Disable some useless stuff in Raspbian

I’m currently running three Raspberry Pi projects, with Raspbian as my choice of distribution. One of the machines will be co-located at FS Data and run ownCloud. The other will be handle switching a central heater between oil and electricyty via SMS. The third is a surveillance camera heavily inspired by Dummy camera made smart with Raspberry Pi by my talented colleague Tomas Bjerre.

While examining the default Raspbian image I noticed there were some things I will never use, so I disabled them to free up some RAM:

1. Disable the consoles by putting a # in front of all lines containing /sbin/getty in /etc/inittab:

   #1:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty --noclear 38400 tty1 #2:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty2 #3:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty3 #4:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty4 #5:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty5 #6:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty6 . . . #T0:23:respawn:/sbin/getty -L ttyAMA0 115200 vt100 If you get into network issues and need the console you can always mount the SD card on another machine and edit the file there!

2. If you don’t have a keyboard connected or otherwise don’t want global hotkeys, disable the triggerhappy global hotkey daemon:

   sudo update-rc.d triggerhappy disable

3. If you have Transmission installed but is not using UPnP, disable the minissdpd daemon for keeping track of UPnP devices:

   sudo update-rc.d minissdpd disable

4. If you run Apache, disable modules you don’t use. Maybe:

   sudo a2dismod dir sudo a2dismod cgi sudo a2dismod negotiation sudo a2dismod autoindex sudo a2dismod setenvif