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!

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