Re: Replacing Gnome with KDE
On Mon, 2006-11-27 at 16:55 -0800, 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've done that .. especially when tired and needing to deploy a bunch of
desktops.
> 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.
>
You may have inadvertently installed a very broken KDE which would be
hard to do. Aptitude goes to some lengths to try and stop you from
breaking anything, and the KDE packages have very intricately woven
inter-dependencies.
That being said, apparently you have found just the right combination of
packages to install that results in something pretty useless. You may
want to do a dpkg -l and send the output to the KDE developers, they may
be interested to see your packages so that they can adjust dependencies
thus preventing someone else from making the same mistake.
Just dpkg -l > /root/package.report.txt and send it along to them if you
have time, with a screen shot of the current "mess" and description of
it.
> 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.
You said you can't get a shell inside of X, are you able to SSH to the
box to do things via command line?
If so, first remove and fully install KDE
apt-get remove kde
apt-get install kde
Then get rid of gnome
apt-get remove gnome
The 'kde' meta package will pull in everything needed. I'm suggesting a
reverse order so that you don't inadvertently uninstall / reinstall some
x11 stuff needlessly and save a bit of bandwidth.
The 'gnome' meta package *should* only consist of the stuff gnome uses
and none of the x11 deps, I however can't be sure of this since I so
rarely deal with gnome.
Hopefully it results in a stable box. I think, personally .. I'd just
repave the machine if possible just to ensure no "oddities" result, but
I understand your reluctance to completely re-install Debian. Messes
like this are rather aggravating.
Hope this helps.
-Tim
> --
> Arlie
>
> (Arlie Stephens arlie@worldash.org)
>
>
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