If you want to quickly customize the applications base on either your Debian based (Ubuntu based should work like Debian) or Arch based installation, you can create simple cut & paste ‘snippets’ or ‘executable scripts’ to accomplish the tasks even more quickly & easily.
To begin, I find it best to create the cut & paste ‘snippets.’ This allows you to test that everything you build into your script is correct. The cut & paste ‘product’ will look something like this:
For Debian Installs:
sudo apt-get purge application1 application2 application999 sudo apt-get autoremove --purge sudo apt-get install applicationA applicationB applicationZZ
For Arch Installs:
sudo pacman -Rns application1 application2 application999 sudo pacman -R $(pacman -Qdtq) sudo pacman -S applicationA applicationB applicationZZ
Now to add your ‘real applications’
This will allow you to customize your installed application base.
In the above examples application# represents any application-name (the same goes for those with digits). For the sake of argument, let’s say
application1 = featherpad
application2 = xfce4-notes-plugin
applicationA = mousepad
applicationB = chromium
In this simple example then we get line 1 as:
In Debian:
sudo apt-get purge featherpad xfce4-notes-plugin
In Arch:
sudo pacman -Rns featherpad xfce4-notes-plugin
Note: you may add as many applications as you like.
For Line 2 (above) we have the following to cleanup any leftovers:
For Debian:
sudo apt-get autoremove --purge
For Arch:
sudo pacman -R $(pacman -Qdtq)
For line 3, we get:
Debian:
sudo apt-get install mousepad chromium
Arch:
sudo pacman -S mousepad chromium
Note: you may add as many applications as you like here, as well.
Copy & paste your commands one at a time into your terminal, wait for each to complete. When they are complete; you are done. Change the application(s) to those you want added or removed. The autoremove step simply cleans up unused leftovers.
N.B.: (This works on XFCE) If you don’t know the application names of the preinstalled applications just go to your applications menu and Right click on the application you want to delete. Generally the first word in the command line is the application name.
Creating this as a script
For those who’d like to make this all into a script so you only need run a single command, here we go.
Open an editor, I generally use mousepad. Once you have your editor open add the following (all from our example above).
For a Debian install:
#!/bin/bash
sudo apt-get purge featherpad xfce4-notes-plugin
sudo apt-get autoremove --purge
sudo apt-get install mousepad chromium
For an arch install:
#!/bin/bash
sudo pacman -Rns featherpad xfce4-notes-plugin
sudo pacman -R $(pacman -Qdtq)
sudo pacman -S mousepad chromium
Save this file as a file you will remember for example “application-mods”.
Once you have saved the file, make it executable. You can do this from terminal of the file manager. To use terminal enter the following command in the directory where you placed the file “application-mods”
chmod +x application-mods
And now to execute the script, all you need enter in the terminal is:
./application-mods
Save the appropriate script and you can run it on your Debian or arch Linux based machine.
Here is the script I use on my Debian machine:
#!/bin/bash sudo apt-get purge gmtp orage featherpad nomacs nomacs-l10n pppoeconf asunder chromium-bsu chromium-bsu-data clipit gmtp gnome-ppp gnome-hearts hexchat hexchat-common lbreakout2 lbreakout2-data mc mc-data xfce4-notes-plugin xfce4-notes peg-e smtube swell-foop xfburn fbreader gscan2pdf dconf feh firefox sudo apt-get autoremove --purge sudo apt-get install plank synapse mousepad keepassx four-in-a-row grsync gnome-disk-utility djview4 djvulibre-plugin gcolor2 agave viewnior fonts-roboto-hinted filezilla clamav clamtk clamassassin chromium gramps grsync zim baobab djview4 ristretto thunar-dropbox-plugin fonts-roboto-hinted