Linux setup steps/Remove unneeded or unwanted Debian packages

From Nick Jenkins

Remove unneeded or unwanted packages for a headless webserver, most especially those that talk to the network.

Note: if you are using the system as a Linux desktop, and especially if you are running Ubuntu, then either skip this step, or take care to make sure that the following doesn't remove packages needed for the desktop to work. For example, on Ubuntu, do NOT remove anything where it will also remove the "ubuntu-desktop" package (use 'q' to quit if aptitude says it is going to remove this).

# remove NFS
aptitude --purge remove nfs-common nfs-kernel-server 

# Remove appletalk compat:
aptitude --purge remove netatalk

# Remove PHP4 (we'll install PHP5 later)
aptitude --purge remove php4-common libapache2-mod-php4

# RPC daemon
aptitude --purge remove portmap

# Remove postgres (we'll install MySQL later)
aptitude --purge remove postgresql-8.1 postgresql-client-8.1 postgresql-common \
 postgresql-doc-8.1 postgresql-contrib-8.1

# remove email related stuff :
aptitude --purge remove qpopper sa-exim uw-imapd

# remove ident:
aptitude --purge remove pidentd

# remove analog
aptitude --purge remove analog

# Remove unneeded packages:
aptitude --purge remove spamassassin spamc python-newt mutt libapache2-mod-perl2 \
                        libapache2-mod-python python-newt

These are steps that make sense on a webserver, but you should probably skip these on a laptop or Linux Desktop:

# DHCP and related functionality
aptitude --purge remove winbind dhcp3-client dhcp3-common 

# remove samba:
aptitude --purge remove samba samba-common samba-doc smbfs

Then purge the old RC files from uninstalled packages:

dpkg --purge $(COLUMNS=132 dpkg -l | grep ^rc | awk '{ print $2; }')

Need to close down open ports. Check what ports are open with these 3 commands, should be stripped back now:

nmap localhost
lsof -i
netstat -l