Manage software with yum

[James Wilkinson]

Joao Paulo Pires wrote:
> Manage software with yum - I am end user (home user). I already 
> installed some stuff like: Xine, Xmms, Mplayer, Skype, NVU, aMule and 
> others. Some with yum commands, other directly from repositories with 
> the problem of dependencies. How can I delete some unnecessary software? 
> I mean really eliminate. Each time I try with yum I am not well succeed. 
> Any help? 
> 
Paul Howarth replied:
> Please be more specific. What are you trying to delete, and what goes 
> wrong when you try? 

Joao said:
> In fact what I'm looking for is what files should I delete (e.g. lost
> files, unneccessary files or programs and programs I do not use
> anymore).

Are you "in the quest for a tidy system", or just trying to recover disk
space?

One of the big users of disk space is yum's cache. The command
yum clean packages
will delete the cache of packages that yum has downloaded (normally it
stores a copy of everything it downloads). The command
yum clean all
deletes everything yum has deleted, which means it will have to
re-download headers next time you do a yum update.

You can also clear out stuff in /tmp: the worst you can do is have to
log out and in again.

If you want to see where disk space has gone, try running
du -sm /* 2>/dev/null
The output looks like:
8       /bin
31      /boot
1       /dev
66      /etc
1648    /home
402     /lib
etc.
The numbers are the size in megabytes. Ignore /dev, /proc and /sys:
they're virtual filesystems that don't actually appear on disk. /home is
your home directory: you should know what everything in there is.

Most programs are under /usr. You can take a look in the subdirectories
of (say) /var with
du -sm /var/* 2>/dev/null

Hopefully you'll have installed all your programs from RPM: using
anything else is a recipe for confusion at best and an uninstallable
program or an unstable system at worst.

I'd be wary of deleting programs you don't know about, or think you
don't use. You might think, for example, you never use something with a
name like "e2fsprogs". But you need the programs to check your disks,
especially if you get a disk or filesystem error.

As it happens, if you try removing e2fsprogs, you'll get error messages
telling you hundreds of packages depend on it. This is A Good Thing, and
the packaging system working as needed. If you go ahead and remove those
packages, on the other hand, you'll get a broken system.

So, as I say, don't delete RPMs you don't know about.

If you want a list of candidates, I'd start with running
rpm -qa --queryformat "%{NAME} %{GROUP}\n" | grep Amusements/
and *some* of the programs from
rpm -qa --queryformat "%{NAME} %{GROUP}\n" | grep Applications/Multimedia

Take a look at them, work out what the RPMs are (rpm -qi xmms is good
for this), and see if you can delete them without taking RPMs you don't
know about or do want with you.

Meanwhile, for what it's worth, the standard on this list is to trim
e-mails down to what's relevant to your reply, and answer underneath.

Hope this helps,

James.
-- 
E-mail address: james | 'In a serial interface, the data bits move down a
@westexe.demon.co.uk  | single channel one after the other, like railway
                      | trains. This is different from the parallel interface
                      | in which groups of bits arrive together, like London
                      | buses.'  -- 'The Computer Dictionary', Jon Wedge