samba libraries

[nodough]

Today I got a notice that there are updates to 3 samba libraries. Since I don't have samba installed, this surprised me. So I did a _locate samba_ search and found many, many files to do with samba. I'd like to remove all of them, but I don't know if it's safe. Would they be used for anything other than samba?

Is there an easy way to do this from the command line?

As to why anyone would install the libraries, icons, etc without the actual program, I'm sure the Ubuntu gods have a reason.

[claydoh]

you need some libraries in order to view and browse samba shares, or, more usefully, be able to use shared printers. Printers shared from another lInux computer, even. The libraries are not Samba itself.

If you post which files you see, we can better see what they are.

my quick guess is that you have the default samba-libs package (and libsmbclient), which contains all the numerous but tiny bits that allow authentication, accessing and viewing Windows shared resources, plus all the man pages and language translations associated with them, as well as some VLC related plugins that allow it to make use of those libraries. Again, none of this is the actual server itself. You could try uninstalling that, but you will find a fair number of things rely on this for the share browsing functionality.

[nodough]

Hello again, claydoh:

I have no Windows in my home, so I don't think I need any of the samba files. I piped them to a text file and (I hope) attached them. Let me know what you think.

TiA.

[claydoh]

yup, these are the library files most every linux distro has.
You should be able to uninstall it using apt, but just make sure it also doesn't remove anything important. It shouldn't. It will likely remove something called 'kubuntu-desktop', which may sound completely important, but isn't. That is just a list of stock Kubuntu dependencies (which includes samba-libs), and is not the actual desktop.

[nodough]

Thanks for this, especially the tip about kubuntu-desktop.

BTW, mysqld is at it again--load averages of 4.5-6.2 :-(