How to : Reduce package size in Ubuntu by installing only required components

Generally whenever you install any package in Ubuntu , by default it installs all the components . This post is about reducing the no of components , in other words you can say unnecessary components which in turn increases the size of the package .To illustrate , lets take of example of XBMC media player installation.

As usual , first i tried with sudo apt-get install package name format .

sudo apt-get install xbmc xbmc-standalone

As you can see 118MB is required to install XBMC media player .

This happens as it installs all recommended packages . Here we can reduce
package size by installing only required components .

To do that , Change your install code format from

sudo apt-get install package name
to
sudo apt-get install – -no-install-recommends package name

I tried this with XBMC install code and i was amazed with the results as
package size was reduced from 118 MB to 87.7 MB.