How To Install idle3-tools on Debian 9
Introduction
In this tutorial we learn how to install idle3-tools
on Debian 9.
What is idle3-tools
idle3-tools is:
Idle3-tools provides a linux/unix utility that can disable, get and set the value of the infamous idle3 timer found on recent Western Digital Hard Disk Drives.
It can be used as an alternative to the official wdidle3.exe proprietary utility, without the need to reboot in a DOS environment.
A power off/on cycle of the drive will still be mandatory for new settings to be taken into account.
Modern Western Digital “Green” Drives include the Intellipark feature that stops the disk when not in use.
Unfortunately, the default timer setting is not perfect on linux/unix systems, including many NAS, and leads to a dramatic increase of the Load Cycle Count value (SMART attribute #193). With the default timer setting, the drive will spin down every eight seconds if idle and this may get the spindle motor to burn out in a few months or so.
If you have a Western Digital EADS or EARS drive, please check you SMART information before it’s too late by running the following command:
sudo smartctl -A /dev/sda | grep “^193”
If the Load cycle count (which is in the last column) exceeds 1000, you’re probably affected by the idle3 timer problem.
There are three methods to install idle3-tools
on Debian 9. We can use apt-get
, apt
and aptitude
. In the following sections we will describe each method. You can choose one of them.
Install idle3-tools Using apt-get
Update apt database with apt-get
using the following command.
sudo apt-get update
After updating apt database, We can install idle3-tools
using apt-get
by running the following command:
sudo apt-get -y install idle3-tools
Install idle3-tools Using apt
Update apt database with apt
using the following command.
sudo apt update
After updating apt database, We can install idle3-tools
using apt
by running the following command:
sudo apt -y install idle3-tools
Install idle3-tools Using aptitude
If you want to follow this method, you might need to install aptitude first since aptitude is usually not installed by default on Debian. Update apt database with aptitude
using the following command.
sudo aptitude update
After updating apt database, We can install idle3-tools
using aptitude
by running the following command:
sudo aptitude -y install idle3-tools
How To Uninstall idle3-tools on Debian 9
To uninstall only the idle3-tools
package we can use the following command:
sudo apt-get remove idle3-tools
Uninstall idle3-tools And Its Dependencies
To uninstall idle3-tools
and its dependencies that are no longer needed by Debian 9, we can use the command below:
sudo apt-get -y autoremove idle3-tools
Remove idle3-tools Configurations and Data
To remove idle3-tools
configuration and data from Debian 9 we can use the following command:
sudo apt-get -y purge idle3-tools
Remove idle3-tools configuration, data, and all of its dependencies
We can use the following command to remove idle3-tools
configurations, data and all of its dependencies, we can use the following command:
sudo apt-get -y autoremove --purge idle3-tools
Dependencies
idle3-tools have the following dependencies:
References
Summary
In this tutorial we learn how to install idle3-tools
package on Debian 9 using different package management tools: apt
, apt-get
and aptitude
.