GNU/Linux Desktop Survival Guide by Graham Williams
Desktop Survival Project Home Preface Advocacy History Distributions Installation Basic Survival Wajig Audio AbiWord APM Backup Bash Booting Cameras CD Chinese ChRoot Clock Commercial Conference Management Configuration CRON CVS Databases DIA Directories Disks Documentation DVD Email Eye of Gnome Evolution File Systems Firewalls Floppy Disks Fonts Ghemical GIMP Glade Gnome GnuCash Gnumeric GQView Graphics Groups HTML Editors ImageMagick Initialisations on Booting Java KDE Kernels Keyboard Konqueror KVM Switch LaTeX Log System Login Magellan Mathematics Memory Modems Mounting Devices MS/Windows Music MySQL Nautilus Networks NFS NT File System OpenOffice.org Oracle Packages Partitions Passwords PDF Photos PPP Presentations Printing Python R Remote Desktops Rsync Samba Scanning Science Security SH File System Sketch Spell SPlus Spruce SSH SUDO Subversion Swap Themes USB Video Virtualization Web Word X XML Sample Installations Troubleshooting Index

Local Cache

When packages are installed from the Debian Archives the corresponding deb files are stored in /var/cache/apt/archive. This can become quite populated with older versions of packages and we can clean out these older versions with:

  $ wajig autoclean                     (apt-get autoclean)

Warning: It is sometimes useful to have older versions of packages hanging around if you are tracking the unstable release. Sometimes the newer versions of packages are broken and you need to revert to an older version which may not be available from the Debian archives, but might be in your local download archive.

If you get short of disk space then you might want to remove all the downloaded deb files (not just the older versions of downloaded files) with:

  $ wajig clean                         (apt-get clean)

To remove files immediately after they have been installed edit /etc/apt/apt.conf:

  // Things that effect the APT dselect method
  DSelect 
  {
    Clean "auto";   // always|auto|prompt|never
  };