Re: How to prevent x startup

[Bill Moseley <moseley@hank.org>]

[sorry for the broken thread - only saw John's message in the archives]

John Hasler writes:

>x-window-system is a dummy package which serves no purpose once the
>packages it depends on are installed.  Remove it.

>Apt won't reinstall it if it has been removed.

Ah, thanks John.  That's the key bit of info that I was missing.  I didn't
think about dummy packages only existing for installation.  I thought they
were only packages with dependencies, yet still real packages that were
upgraded and removing would thus remove all their depends.

Thanks.

# apt-get remove xdm
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  x-window-system xdm 
0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 2 to remove and 10  not upgraded.
Need to get 0B of archives. After unpacking 811kB will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y
(Reading database ... 47940 files and directories currently installed.)
Removing x-window-system ...
Removing xdm ...
dpkg - warning: while removing xdm, directory `/etc/X11/xdm/pixmaps' not empty so not removed.
dpkg - warning: while removing xdm, directory `/etc/X11/xdm' not empty so not removed.

Why does that happen?  All of the files in those directories have the same
timestamp.

# dpkg -l xdm
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Installed/Config-files/Unpacked/Failed-config/Half-installed
|/ Err?=(none)/Hold/Reinst-required/X=both-problems (Status,Err:
uppercase=bad)
||/ Name                Version             Description
+++-===================-===================-======================================================
rc  xdm                 4.2.1-3             X display manager




-- 
Bill Moseley moseley@hank.org