How does one get a clean installation of Fedora?

[lee]

Sam Varshavchik <mrsam at courier-mta.com> writes:

> lee writes:
>
>> Sam Varshavchik <mrsam at courier-mta.com> writes:
>>
>> > lee writes:
>> >
>> >> Hi,
>> >>
>> >> how does one get a clean installation of Fedora?  "Clean" means that
>> >> only those packages are installed that are actually needed and only
>> >> those services are running that are actually needed.
>> >
>> > Very easy:
>> >
>> > Step 1: figure out what packages and services you need.
>> > Step 2: install just those packages and services that you need.
>>
>> Unfortunately, the broken dependencies seem to prevent step 2 ---
>> otherwise I could simply remove unneeded packages.
>
> Define "broken dependencies".

The avahi-daemon is a good example.  It's not needed and cannot be
removed without taking the system down because too many packages depend
on it.

> If what you want requires another package to be installed, you will
> have to install it. That's not a "broken dependency". It's a required
> dependency.

For example, VLC, like many other things, depends on avahi and doesn't
need the avahi-daemon.  So you end up not only having things installed
you don't need, you also run software you don't need to run.

> Real broken dependencies are rare, and tend to get fixed easily.

Apparently the dependency problems with the NVIDIA drivers were not
fixed so easily, if they ever were.

> Pretty much every package that gets installed requires glibc. Even
> though you may not have any direct need for glibc, it has to be
> installed, and the fact that it has to be installed does not mean that
> it's broken.

That's because software in such packages actually uses and needs the
library to run.  VLC runs fine without the avahi-daemon.

> So:
>
> 1) Figure out the list of packages you need, and which are not installed.
> 2) yum install [packages]
> 3) yum will also install any additional required packages.
> 4) run package-cleanup --leaves
> 5) examine the output, pick packages that you don't need.
> 6) yum remove --remove-leaves
>
> Done.

You're not done at this point.  You need to check what is running and is
not needed or wanted and figure out how to either disable or remove it.
That is tedious and difficult because for much of the stuff there isn't
any documentation telling you what it does and what it is for.

For example, what is at-spi-bus-launcher?  It's running for unknown
reasons and it doesn't have a manpage.  What is it for?  What does it
do?  Do I need it?

Why is alsactl running all the time?  It didn't use to do that, so why
is it running all the time now?  What about rtkit-daemon?  Apparently
pulseaudio needs it, but I don't need pulseaudio, it's only eating lots
of CPU time and not doing anything useful.

If I hadn't removed udisksd, my disk wouldn't go into sleep mode.  I had
to remove it because there is no way to disable it.  That also removed
kaffeine, so if I needed kaffeine, I'd have to compile it from source to
get it without udisksd.  I'm sure it would work just fine.

When you just leave it, your computer will be busy with running all
kinds of stuff you don't need or want, even with bad effects like disks
not going to sleep.  This is a bad situation.


-- 
Fedora release 19 (Schrödinger’s Cat)