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The apt-get autoremove command does not have any effect in Maverick. How can I solve that?

EDIT: Restoring a VM backup containing a clean install solved the problem.

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What does it means? You can see packages to remove but autoremove doesn't work? –  skalka Oct 31 '10 at 18:42
Yes, exactly that. There are packages to remove, but the autoremove don't do squat. –  lovinglinux Oct 31 '10 at 18:50
This question would be easier to address if you gave some detail. What packages are tagged for autoremove? Is the package actually installed? dpkg -l package-name can cross-check what apt-get lists as not needed. Does removing a specific package yield a different result (e.g. apt-get remove package-name)? What does apt-get check have to say for itself? –  msw Oct 31 '10 at 20:04
The packages are installed, because they were installed as dependency of another package, which has been already removed. I have executed autoremove just after removing it and receiving the alert about packages that were not needed anymore. Besides, there were several packages in the Computer Janitor list. I can't run those commands now, because I have already reset the virtual machine, but I still want to fix this issue. –  lovinglinux Oct 31 '10 at 20:12
Do you have a file /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/01autoremove? Autoremove was borked during the Maverick dev cycle, so maybe you ran into some kind of upgrade problem? –  htorque Oct 31 '10 at 20:44
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2 Answers

Go to System > Administration > Computer Janitor. You can find all the packages that can be removed.

But, I am not sure whether it happens in 10.10

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Thanks. However, I would really like to restore the autoremove functionality, because I don't trust Computer Janitor and also prefer to do it via command-line. –  lovinglinux Oct 31 '10 at 19:18
Me either. But, I am on Ubuntu 10.04. I have no idea regarding that. :| –  Vinay Challuru Oct 31 '10 at 19:43
I'm also on 10.04 and won't upgrade. The problem is occurring on a VM I use for testing me applications. –  lovinglinux Oct 31 '10 at 21:53
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Restoring a VM backup containing a clean install solved the problem.

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