Cleaning up a Debian GNU/Linux system
A common problem faced by many Debianers who don’t need to reinstall the system over years: accumulated auto-installed packages which are no longer required.
Here’s a solution suggested at Debian Administration :
… One form of neglection is to install, install, install and never un-install any package. The common utility to perform installation and un-installation of packages is apt-get which adds to the problem because it doesn’t have automatic removal of non-needed dependences.
…
Aptitude to the rescue. Aptitude is another package manager front-end like apt-get but it can keep track of automatically and non-automatically installed packages.
…That is nice, but since the neglecting previous administrator didn’t use Aptitude, all the packages are marked as non automatically installed. …
Well, the answer is: try to mark all files as automatically installed except those that you really want. To do that you can use the following (which you could write in one line if you want): …
A simple solution to a simple problem 
