19 May 2008 | Ceci n'est pas une pipe

What you see is an image captured at over 5000 meters above sea level! This is a frame of video that I recorded on Friday afternoon during the test transmission from the Italian scientific station ABC Pyramid , located at the foot of Mount Everest.

The hands are those of the scientist frantically typing Gianpietro Cabbage : at that very moment we were exchanging some information to solve a problem with the audio transmission. The movie was filmed with a video capture device that can operate at searing temperatures of 8000 and placed on a special helmet.

Ah ... the one you see on the left is not - as you might think - a cheap can of beer, but a sophisticated electronic device top secret military ... or not?

With the passing of time each operating system tends to accumulate portions of code that - because of the normal activities of installation, upgrade and uninstall software - becomes obsolete and is not intended to be used any more. The distro called "Debian based" provide a powerful, yet simple to solve the problem: the `` deborphan.

This application does nothing but provide the complete list of packages that do not depend on any other package, even the core operating system, whose presence is absolutely unnecessary:

ziovanja:~# deborphan opensyncutils libalut0 libsynaptics0 plib1.8.4c2 libicu36 libxt-java libportaudio0 libportaudio2 libdivxdecore0-binary libneon26-gnutls gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3 libhsqldb-java libavahi-compat-howl0 gstreamer0.10-pitfdll libdivxencore0-binary php5-ming libmdbtools kdebindings-java libdvdplay0 bsdtar libdivx0-binary

Combining the `deborphan` with `apt-get` one can easily obtain the removal of all unused packages:

apt-get remove --purge `deborphan`

Caution: for obvious reasons, the removal of a package can create in turn new deborphans, so you must cast the statement above several times, until you get the complete removal of all orphaned packages. Try it!