Re: Replacing Gnome with KDE
On Monday 27 November 2006 17:55, Arlie Stephens wrote:
> I made the mistake of selecting 'workstation' when installing etch. It
> managed to do the X installation correctly, without needing to be
> rescued manually, which is way better than I've seen from earlier
> debians. That's the good news. The _bad_ news is that it installed
> gnome, and apparantly only gnome.
>
> I used aptitude to select any packages that looked like they might be
> part of kde, and remove any packages that looked like they might be
> part of the guts of gnome. The result is a mess. I appear to be
> running kdm (according to ps), but the result has the look and feel of
> nothing much. If it's kde, it's sure changed - a lot.
>
> I'm not sure whether the problem is that I'm missing a few pieces of
> kde, still have gnome bits running that shouldn't be, or simply that
> the various package installation scripts emphatically failed to do the
> right thing. At this point, the system is only usable if I bypass X
> entirely - there's no way to get a shell window inside X. There's also
> no control center, or any of the other things that ought to be on the
> icon/menu bar that normally loves at the bottom of the screen.
>
> Any suggestions for how to fix this mess? At the moment, the best
> thing I can think of would be to reinstall, with tasksel/kde-desktop.
> I'd prefer something a little less drastic.
>
> --
> Arlie
>
> (Arlie Stephens arlie@worldash.org)
The easiest thing to do is to get a listing of the packages installed:
dpkg --get-selections
Then you can search for gnome packages, i.e
dpkg --get-selections | grep gnome
Once you get a listing of the packages, then you can start removing them, i.e.
aptitude purge gnome_package_name
For instance, it looks like you probably have gnome-core installed, so doing
this would remove quite a bit of gnome:
aptitude purge gnome-core
Keep doing dpkg --get-selections | grep gnome and the aptitude purge to remove
packages. Also, you may want to make sure you get rid of gdm if you can,
i.e.
aptitude purge gdm
Then you can install kde, i.e.
aptitude install kde kdm (just to be sure)
It "should" drag in a bunch of packages. If it doesn't then you can drag in
the meta packages for the different areas, like kdenetwork, kdebase,
kdeutils, etc.
aptitutude install kdebase kdenetwork kdeutils
You can use the command "apt-cache show kde" to get a listing of what packages
are connected to the package "kde".
Note this is all command line stuff. I am sure you can do the same thing with
the aptitude front-end, I just don't use aptitude that way so I can't offer
any advice.
John
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