Gentoo Blog

If you want to clean up your Ubuntu or Debian machine and delete unnecessary (orphaned) deb packages you can use the utility deborphan. It finds packages that have no packages depending on them. First install deborphan:

aptitude install deborphan

Then start of with a dry run just to make sure that you are not removing any packages you still need

deborphan --guess-all

To delete unnecessary data packages use the command:

sudo deborphan --guess-data | xargs sudo aptitude -y purge

To delete all unnecessary packages use the command:

sudo deborphan --guess-all | xargs sudo aptitude -y purge

To get rid of downloaded deb packages use:

aptitude autoclean

I was having a problem with one of our ubuntu servers and it’s locals. I was seeing the following error after typing local:

root@wiki:~# locale
locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory
LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="de_DE"
LC_NUMERIC="de_DE"
LC_TIME="de_DE"
LC_COLLATE="de_DE"
LC_MONETARY="de_DE"
LC_MESSAGES="de_DE"
LC_PAPER="de_DE"
LC_NAME="de_DE"
LC_ADDRESS="de_DE"
LC_TELEPHONE="de_DE"
LC_MEASUREMENT="de_DE"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="de_DE"
LC_ALL=de_DE


So i deceided to set my locals in my .bashrc for root. Like this:

export LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
export LC_ALL=de_DE.UTF-8


I was still getting error messages because the locals where not generated on the server. To generate German locals with UTF-8 issue the following command:

localedef -v -c -i de_DE -f UTF-8 de_DE.UTF-8

Thats it the command local -a should now display something like this:

root@wiki:~# locale -a
C
de_DE.utf8
en_US.utf8
POSIX

The command local should display:

root@wiki:~# locale
LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=de_DE.UTF-8


To do this for US locals use this command:

localedef -v -c -i en_US -f UTF-8 en_US.UTF-8 and also change the export command above