Local or Obsolete packages and upgrading Ubuntu

[Liam Proven]

On 22 February 2013 14:01, Colin Law <clanlaw at googlemail.com> wrote:
> I am preparing to upgrade my Quantal system to Raring and following
> the suggestions in [1] I have opened Synaptic Package Manager, clicked
> on Status and selected Installed (local or obsolete) and expected to
> see a short list of stuff I had installed from downloaded debs etc.
> Instead I see a long list of packages including, for example
> libcamel-1.2-33, libcamel-1.2-39, libcupsdriver1, libpoppler26, proj,
> ubuntuone-installer, ubuntuone-control-panel-common and many more.
>
> Does anyone know how these might have got there and whether I can
> safely remove them?
>
> Colin
>
> [1] https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CleanUpgrade

If you really want to go to an unfinished beta, I'd strongly suggest a
clean install into a new partition and just share your existing /home
partition. That's what I do. You keep all your desktop customisations
but you do not endanger your current system.

However, if you are determined to do an upgrade, then there is little
you can do to remove extras. The simplest way is:

sudo -s
apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade -y
apt-get clean
apt-get autoclean
apt-get autoremove -y
apt-get purge

This makes sure you're up to date, empties the package caches, removes
any packages you have that nothing else depends upon, and removes any
lingering config files from no-longer-installed packages.


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