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Howto: Simple tuning of Debian systems

Share your HowTo, Documentation, Tips and Tricks. Not for support questions!.
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canci
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#16 Post by canci »

Nice howto! :)

I have a li'l tip here. Wanna reduce the overhead while starting up X?
Maybe this tool helps:

http://www.hacom.nl/~richard/software/xtoolwait.html

It makes proggies added to your .xsession wait until an acutally loading
prog is consuming memory. This way the startup should be faster.
Instructions are on the site...
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Swynndla
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#17 Post by Swynndla »

I did some timing tests with prelink, and it did not seem to speed anything up (at least for me), so I removed it again.

What I did was, I booted up, and ran in konsole:

Code: Select all

(konqueror &) && (kcontrol &) && (kprinter &) && (kinfocenter &) && (xterm &) && (kate &) && (kwrite &) && (iceweasel &) && (oowriter &)
... and timed how long everything took to open.

Then I rebooted to clear the memory, and apt-got prelink, and ran /usr/sbin/prelink -avmR, and then ran the same command as above again, but everything took just as long to open up.

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#18 Post by craigevil »

Unfortunately deborphan doesn't play nice with Sid.

Gentoo Linux Prelink Guide
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/prelink-howto.xml

Although written for Gentoo most of what is there seems to work well and not cause any issues in Debian.

A decent guide for tweaking a Sid system , other than the deborphan part, (which really needs to be edited out), is:
System tweaking
http://sidux.com/index.php?module=pnWikka&tag=Tweaking

Prelinking along with preload and AND seem to keep things running nice as smooth.
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#19 Post by rickh »

Unfortunately deborphan doesn't play nice with Sid.
Hmmm! I've never heard that, and I do use it every now and then (deborphan | xargs dpkg --purge). Guess I'll study it a little more before I do it again.
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#20 Post by craigevil »

Code: Select all

craigevil:/home/craig# deborphan
libpqxx-2.6.8
kdelibs
libexif-gtk5
libcurl4-openssl
libflac++5
libpoppler0c2-qt
libstlport5.1
libcdaudio1
libgpod1
libboost-filesystem1.33.1
libsdl-sound1.2
libbind9-0
libnotify1
libmpeg3-1
libcrypto++6
libsvnqt3
libsnmp9
libxapian13
gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
libkpathsea4
libpanel-applet2-0
plib1.8.4c2
libotr2
libgd2-noxpm
libpostproc0d
libxt-java
libgnome-desktop-2
liblwres9
libjasper-1.701-1
libmagick++9c2a
libmetacity0
gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
libgtksourceview1.0-0
libarts1-audiofile
libcal3d11c2a
libxul0d
libode0c2
libmyspell3c2
libdb4.2
libgail17
libiw28
liboggflac3
libpostproccvs51
libavformat0d
libept0
libx264-54
libmcrypt4
libgksu1.2-0
libglu1-xorg
guile-1.6-libs
libnautilus-burn4
libnautilus-burn3
libzvbi0
libmdbtools
libc6-i686
libdvdnav4
libkexif1
libqt4-qt3support
guile-1.8-libs
libk9copy0
libgdl-1-0
libexiv2-0.10
libwnck18
libid3-3.8.3c2a
libaldmb1
libgksuui1.0-1
libwine-twain
libarts1-xine
Probably 90% of the above belong to packages that I have installed and use.
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Swynndla
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#21 Post by Swynndla »

How do you determine if one of those belong to packages that you use?

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#22 Post by rickh »

How do you determine if one of those belong to packages that you use?
One way is "apt-cache rdepends"

That will list all the packages Apt knows about which depend on the one you identify in the command, whether or not you actually have them installed.

It's quite a confusing (to me) area, though. Sometimes you can delete a package even though some other package shows up as a (reverse) dependency, and the dependent application will still work.
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#23 Post by garrincha »

rickh wrote:
How do you determine if one of those belong to packages that you use?
One way is "apt-cache rdepends"
It's apt-rdepends, I think that the name may have changed.
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#24 Post by rickh »

It's apt-rdepends, I think that the name may have changed
Either works. You have to install apt-rdepends as a separate program.
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#25 Post by garrincha »

rickh wrote:
It's apt-rdepends, I think that the name may have changed
Either works. You have to install apt-rdepends as a separate program.
Yeah, you're correct -
http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/apt-rdepends
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#26 Post by Bulkley »

I'm puzzled by localepurge and the locales. I'm showing en and three en-us locales. Do I need them all? If I had my druthers, I'd like everything to use Canadian English, but I know that is unlikely. Can I cut back to a single choice? Or is that risky?

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#27 Post by craigevil »

localepurge does have its bugs.

Debian -- localepurge
Please note, that this tool is a hack which is *not* integrated with Debian's package management system and therefore is not for the faint of heart. This program interferes with the Debian package management and does provoke strange, but usually harmless, behaviour of programs related with apt/dpkg like dpkg-repack, debsums, reportbug, etc. Responsibility for its usage and possible breakage of your system therefore lies in the sysadmin's (your) hands.

Please definitely do abstain from reporting any such bugs blaming localepurge if you break your system by using it. If you don't know what you are doing and can't handle any resulting breakage on your own then please simply don't use this package.
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#28 Post by Swynndla »

I've personally been using both deborphan and localepurge for ages without any problems at all.

localepurge seems to save me a surprising amount of space.

I guess the thing to remember is, don't use them unless you know what you are doing?

Another question that I've started to ask myself is "why isn't prelink|deborphan|localepurge|swappiness (and all the other 1000's of tweaks) part of the standard install/kernel?" I bet there are good reasons, but I think it's important to try and find out what those reasons are. It makes sense for me not to install a tweak unless I know what the downsides are.

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#29 Post by e1even1 »

Swynndla wrote:I've personally been using both deborphan and localepurge for ages without any problems at all.
i can personally vouch for the localepurge warning. to get xemacs21 as a dependancy on one of my systems (after localepurge), i ended up having to add some russian manpage directory. very very boring.

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#30 Post by mechmg93 »

i read the gentoo prelink guide and i have a question??

the right file in debian for putting the line export KDE_IS_PRELINKED="1"

is /etc/profile??

i put it there, rebooted but kdeinit is still running :roll:
Last edited by mechmg93 on 2007-08-22 14:33, edited 1 time in total.

Azriel
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#31 Post by Azriel »

deborphan also works randomly for me. I've used it with my etch debian, and now with sid, and i get the same problem than said above: it find orphaned libraries which are not orphaned at all.

It would strongly advise to try a

Code: Select all

deborphan -d
before everything in order to see the dependencies of the libs, and then remove carefully one by one the one you think are ok for removal...

[EDIT]: ok, just after posting that, i've started to clean my HDD using deborphan -d, and apt-get remove the libraries without dependencies, and now, the ony thing found by bedorphan is tcltls, which is used by amsn, but is not really a dependencie (since amsn can work without it), so not really a problem. Just deborphan -A tcltls and it's done. Still i strongly advise removing manually each package, even if it is only to know what the hell is going on on your system :).

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#32 Post by Lavene »

I have never had deborphan (I use the 'orphaner' frontend) remove libs with dependencies, but if it does it should be reported as a bug. However: if you have anything installed from source you can not trust it anymore of course since those dependencies are not known to apt.

Also remember that Unstable is called unstable for a reason. I can easily imagine deborphan fail on Sid systems...

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#33 Post by rickh »

I have never had a problem on Sid using # deborphan | xargs dpkg --purge

But, obviously, I don't guarantee that you won't. The question that arises in my mind is whether using dpkg --purge is leaving cruft from packages it is deleting.

I haven't gotten brave enough yet to try # deborphan | xargs aptitude remove
Debian-Lenny/Sid 32/64
Desktop: Generic Core 2 Duo, EVGA 680i, Nvidia
Laptop: Generic Intel SIS/AC97

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