2016-01-29 Removing some ubuntu processes
Long ago I wrote some articles and gave some lectures about simplifying Linux systems by running less processes. Today I looked at my Ubuntu laptop and saw it always has a load average around 0.33 and over 80 processes running. There were some obvious programs I didn't need and some I didn't know about. I used dpkg -S to find out what packages the processes were included in. (Some didn't have man pages.)
I removed modemmanager, edited /etc/default/console-setup and moved /etc/init/tty[456].conf to reduce my virtual terminals, removed tor and a GeoIP database for Tor, removed colord (why do I need a system daemon to manage device colour profiles?), removed winbind and its PAM plugin (why do I care about Windows domain user/group lookup?), and ntp. I also added to my crontab to run ntpdate twice a day instead. There is more to understand -- like why do I need a daemon to provide a DBUS interface for adding, modifying, and deleting user accounts (accountsservice package)?