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Advice on CLEANUP.....

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ramblin
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Advice on CLEANUP.....

#1 Post by ramblin »

I have installed and configured Debian 9 Stretch on my 3 GHz. Pentium 4 desktop. Even more amazing is I have installed all my favorite hardware, apps, and players, (Spotify and WiFi being the most difficult) and everything is working Fantastic ! I downloaded dozens of packages, drivers and apps, a lot of it unnecessary to get everything working. I`ve had no issues streaming anything, however it takes a while to get to a desktop and I feel the whole system must be bloated. Space is not an issue but I would like to safely remove anything hindering performance and optimizing my minimum resources. Where to start ??

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dasein
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Re: Advice on CLEANUP.....

#2 Post by dasein »

RAM?

DE?

Don't make folks guess.

ramblin
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Re: Advice on CLEANUP.....

#3 Post by ramblin »

dasein wrote:RAM?

DE?

Don't make folks guess.


Ram is 2 GB, the most I had for 2 slots. I could always add more. DE ??? Now you are making me guess. Hee.. Hee....

Bulkley
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Re: Advice on CLEANUP.....

#4 Post by Bulkley »

Off the top the cheapest thing you can do is run a window manager instead of the desktop. Desktops are always bloated resource hogs. Window managers are lightweight but require more user configuration.

Doubling your RAM might help.

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dasein
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Re: Advice on CLEANUP.....

#5 Post by dasein »

ramblin wrote:Hee.. Hee....
Oh, so you think it's funny to waste folks' time--to make them ask and ask again, and then again and...

Well here's the even funnier part: http://forums.debian.net/ucp.php?i=zebr ... dd=ramblin

Game over.

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GarryRicketson
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Re: Advice on CLEANUP.....

#6 Post by GarryRicketson »


kedaha
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Re: Advice on CLEANUP.....

#7 Post by kedaha »

Watching the machine booting is boring so what I do is just switch the computer on, walk away from it—usually to the kitchen—and by the time I get back the desktop environment or DE is up and running. A 3 GHz Pentium running a i386 system is not the fastest of machines, specially with only 2G memory.
ramblin wrote: Space is not an issue but I would like to safely remove anything hindering performance and optimizing my minimum resources.
Cleanup tips such as those detailed at raphaelhertzog.com won't make the system boot or run any faster but you may have installed unnecessary stuff which is not necessary for a DE.
DebianStable

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$ vrms

No non-free or contrib packages installed on debian!  rms would be proud.

ramblin
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Re: Advice on CLEANUP.....

#8 Post by ramblin »

DE = desktop environment. OK, I really couldn`t figure that out. I certainly wouldn`t waste any ones time. Only meant that lightheartly because I really didn`t know. I spend hours looking here before I post. I just don`t want to screw up what I did. I will follow the link provided. Any other advice is welcome. After all, I am a noob at this.

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Lysander
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Re: Advice on CLEANUP.....

#9 Post by Lysander »

ramblin wrote:I spend hours looking here before I post. I just don`t want to screw up what I did. I will follow the link provided. Any other advice is welcome. After all, I am a noob at this.
Hours, eh... Anyway, I would be interested to know just how long your boot takes. Care to time it? My guess is that this is a hardware 'issue' that can only be expected with running a single core, 2GB RAM machine with presumably a platter drive.

Just run

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sudo apt autoremove
sudo apt autoclean
to get rid of extraneous packages.

ramblin
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Re: Advice on CLEANUP.....

#10 Post by ramblin »

Hours here and hours on 4-5 other sites figuring out Spotify and wireless. to be honest I don`t know how linux works. If extra packages and drivers, est. cause no resource issues I`m happy to leave them alone. I`m thrilled with it now. I just ordered ram. See, I am paying attention. So now I will research "apt autoremove and autoclean".

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Re: Advice on CLEANUP.....

#11 Post by MALsPa »

ramblin wrote:DE = desktop environment. OK, I really couldn`t figure that out.
So, what DE are you running? Stuff that's starting up with the DE is probably what's slowing down the time it takes to get to the desktop, more than anything else.

ramblin
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Re: Advice on CLEANUP.....

#12 Post by ramblin »

I`m using lightdm (is that cinnamon?) A window manager was recommended over a desktop. How would I go about trying that ?

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Re: Advice on CLEANUP.....

#13 Post by MALsPa »

lightdm is a display manager. Try this command, it might show which DE you're using:

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echo $XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP

ramblin
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Re: Advice on CLEANUP.....

#14 Post by ramblin »

X-Cinnamon

ramblin
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Re: Advice on CLEANUP.....

#15 Post by ramblin »

OK, after much research today on autoclean and autoremove I have concluded that as a rookie this is not the way for me to go. I have chose instead to use the "packages" utility and remove one at a time. Since I had a scratchpad of notes, a lot dealing with wireless it has not been bad. New questions. If I plan on using only cinnamon desktop can I safely remove a lot of the KDE and GNOME packages such as wallpapers and plasma themes? Some of these are huge. My 1st question on this forum dealt with getting my desktop to load and I was putting in everything I could find KDE and GNOME. have found some KDE and GNOME utilities I like and have been using. Wouldn`t want to mess them up. #2 When running KDE System Monitor, with Firefox up what would be a normal amount of processes running. I`m at 151 which seems a little high to me.

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Re: Advice on CLEANUP.....

#16 Post by kedaha »

My —admittedly rather boring— advice, which I follow myself, is to only use only one desktop environment and learn as much as possible about it. "Jack of all trades, master of none" as the saying goes. :wink: For instance, I just use the mate desktop and stable and keep packages to a minimum otherwise I can't see the wood for the trees. Even so I still think I should perhaps change to something simpler like LXDE or a window manager but I never get round to it because I'm a bit set in my ways.
You'd probably get the job done sooner by starting afresh.
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kopper
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Re: Advice on CLEANUP.....

#17 Post by kopper »

If you really want the easiest way to clean and minimal system, reinstall and do it the way you want this time, based on what you have already learned. Another option is to get a list of installed packages and start to go through them and check their dependencies before removing the unnecessary ones. This requires that you know or can properly research what each of the packages do and while educational, maybe I'd rather suggest just clean install. Kedaha gave a sound advise to pick a desktop environment and stay with it a while to learn an see what it's really like. If you decide you don't like it, just install another and try that.
ramblin wrote: My 1st question on this forum dealt with getting my desktop to load and I was putting in everything I could find KDE and GNOME. have found some KDE and GNOME utilities I like and have been using.
Your hardware seems rather limited so I'd avoid having tools from different desktop environments in use. This might not be that big of a deal resource-wise, but for consistency I suggest the same than kedaha. Just use one DE and learn to use it well. Basically, every functionality can be done a way or another in all of the desktop environments, so you're really not missing out. If you feel that it doesn't affect your system's performance or you don't care about the space multiple DE potentially wastes, you're of course free to use whatever tools you want. But that's really up to you (and your hardware). Also, having multiple DE's seem to fight against your wish to have minimal system, so picking one would sound reasonable.
ramblin wrote:When running KDE System Monitor, with Firefox up what would be a normal amount of processes running. I`m at 151 which seems a little high to me.
Sounds fine to me but then again, your hardware might think otherwise. I'm sure you feel it under your fingertips when system resources grow inadequate.
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dasein
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Re: Advice on CLEANUP.....

#18 Post by dasein »

(Obligatory preface mentioning my ongoing peeve that the 'ignore' function doesn't work on quoted text.)

But for the benefit of those who may run across this thread on the future...

Folks who overload ancient hardware with high-end, graphically-intensive DEs forfeit the right to complain about slowness. It's really no different than someone complaining that a Model T can't tow a 10-ton load.

Ditto folks who mix DEs. Although nothing forbids starting up, say, both Nautilius and K3B, the two programs load different libraries and thus end up gobbling RAM like it's candy.

Minimal hardware requires minimalist environment. Not exactly rocket surgery.

Taking a WM-only approach is do-able (Fluxbox FTW! :-D), but by the time one adds some sort of file manager, media player, etc. to the mix, there's really very little savings in using only a WM. Happily, plenty of minimalist DE options exist: Xfce, Trinity, etc., ad nauseam.

(P.S. 151 processes is perfectly sensible, particularly in the case of a multi-DE "FrankenDesktop." The vast majority of those processes are sleeping anyway, and thus have minimal/no impact on performance, beyond consuming a few KB of RAM.)

ramblin
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Re: Advice on CLEANUP.....

#19 Post by ramblin »

Guys, I have learned an incredible amount from this thread in the last 2 days. If I only knew this a week ago I would be in a different situation. A week ago this started as a project to try Debian on a low resource machine of which I have many of. The results has far exceeded my expectations. I love the setup and can`t wait to install it on a real machine. I will keep picking piece by piece out with the "packages" utility. It is a great learning experience for me. If I mess it up to bad I will do like kopper says and reinstall based on what I`ved learned. I have another Pentium4 Win XP machine to swap out. I will do a better job on that one. They just stream all day and should be good for that. In the 2 threads I posted I had many replys. People here have really reached out to teach me and I really appreciate it. Thanks for all the info !

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