Re: Replacing Gnome with KDE
Thank you, everyone who offered suggestions and observations. I've got
KDE working, basically by using aptitude to remove the remaining bits
of gnome, and then (re)installing the kde meta-packages.
On Nov 28 2006, Tim Post wrote:
> 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.
I think this is precisely what I did, probably by not using the
highest level metapackages - and also by not completely extirpating
gnome first - I didn't know to look for things with names like
'nautilus'.
> 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.
Unfortunately, I'd already started tinkering by the time I got this
message. I'm pretty sure I'd done something like installing kdm and
kde-core, rather than kde, but I'm not sure precisely
what. Unfortunately, that's not enough for a useful bug report, short
of trying to break things again - and I'm also uncertain whether I was
the only contributor to the resulting mess. (A coworker had attempted
to fix things using some GUI tool he found in X/gnome - which wound up
claiming that kde could not be found, after first offering to install
it - and may have messed up a few things while coming to this
conclusion. At that point, I took over, and switched to aptitude...)
> 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.
I may yet wind up restarting from scratch, but I'm going to make sure
I find all the land mines first. I'll probably be back to the list
with more questions when I hit the next one.
> Hope this helps.
> -Tim
--
Arlie
(Arlie Stephens arlie@worldash.org)
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