[xubuntu-users] magic processes

Ralf Mardorf silver.bullet at zoho.com
Thu Jul 12 05:21:56 UTC 2018


On Wed, 11 Jul 2018 15:08:14 -0700, Cody Smith wrote:
>Those are important processes, 
>
>Gvfs is a filesystem mounting daemon from Gnome

For a lot of users GVFS is an absolutely unneeded process, only good to
kill external green drives by causing it to spin up right each time it
spin down. Since there are insane hard dependencies to packages, that
are absolutely useless for some users, such as GVFS or pulseaudio, I
recommend to install dummy packages to fulfil those dependencies.

I for example mount, list, remove, copy etc. from command line and I'm
using a green external drive, so GVFS is useless for me and apart from
this, it harms the green drive. I'm using plain ALSA or the jackd sound
server, so pulseaudio is useless for me and apart from this it's
counter-productive in a real-time audio context. Nowadays it might be
possible to stop pulseaudio, but why installing something just to
execute a command to stop it? I'm using syslinux from my Arch Linux
install on the same machine, so any boot loader installed by the Ubuntu
install is useless. To get rid of the bootloader package, a dummy
package not necessarily always is required, but unfortunately sometimes
it is.

A dummy package could be build by using
https://packages.ubuntu.com/bionic/equivs ,
http://shallowsky.com/blog/linux/install/blocking-deb-dependencies.html .

[weremouse at moonstudio dummies]$ lsb_release -a
LSB Version:	core-9.20160110ubuntu0.2-amd64:core-9.20160110ubuntu0.2-noarch:security-9.20160110ubuntu0.2-amd64:security-9.20160110ubuntu0.2-noarch
Distributor ID:	Ubuntu
Description:	Ubuntu 16.04.4 LTS
Release:	16.04
Codename:	xenial
[weremouse at moonstudio dummies]$ ls
grub-pc  grub-pc_07-13-moonstudio_all.deb  gvfs  gvfs_07-13-moonstudio_all.deb  pulseaudio  pulseaudio_07-13-moonstudio_all.deb
[weremouse at moonstudio dummies]$ cat gvfs
Priority: optional
Standards-Version: 3.9.2

Package: gvfs
Version: 2016:07-13-moonstudio
Maintainer: Weremouse <silver.bullet at zoho.com>
Architecture: all
Description: Dummy package

Another way to get executables clear away is using dpkg-divert. It's
part of the dpkg package. I used dpkg-divert to rename grub-mkconfig
and update-grub.

dpkg-divert --add --rename --divert /usr/bin/new_name /usr/bin/original_name

Even if I ever should use GRUB2 from Ubuntu, I still would
edit /boot/grub/grub.cfg manually. It saves a lot of time, if during an
upgrade no new /boot/grub/grub.cfg is generated, let alone that the
only way to get a slim /boot/grub/grub.cfg is to manually edit it.





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