remove items from the debian menu

Easier than i thought.  Look for .desktop files for the application you want to remove in .local/share/applications and /usr/share/applications

Real firefox on debian

Courtesy of http://superuser.com/questions/322376/how-to-install-real-firefox-on-debian

(apt-get remove iceweasel first if you have it installed)

sudo apt-get remove iceweasel
sudo echo -e "\ndeb http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/ubuntuzilla/mozilla/apt all main" | tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list > /dev/null
sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com C1289A29
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install firefox-mozilla-build

remove unnecessary packages from your debian install

sudo aptitude remove `deborphan --guess-all`

nothing to it.

if you then want to free up disk space by getting rid of all the deb packages apt has cached, run

sudo aptitude autoclean