Re: You can have any color you want - as long as it's Gnome?
On 10/07/2013 03:10 AM, Oliver Fairhall wrote:
Thanks for posting on this Jape. I'm new to Debian (preparing to install
soon) and will likely be caught by this. Hope it's OK to ask some newby
questions.
If you don't mind getting (possibly) dumb answers.
;-)
I want a light weight DE, and was thinking to use XFCE (been fine on my
other distros). I'm at best an intermediate level with Linux, so will
likely struggle with not installing Gnome (really don't want Gnome or KDE).
On 07/10/13 02:31, Jape Person wrote:
> From my perspective, it looks to me as though the problem is
> network-manager-gnome's desire to install gnome-control-center. Xfce
and LXDE
> both want network-manager-gnome, so they also get gnome-control-center,
> gnome-session, and just about everything else gnome-like.
Is it possible to not install network-manager-gnome when installing
Debian with XFCE? I've bypassed the network manager in Ubuntu in the
past, running on a desktop machine, and just configured network access
by text file anyway. Not sure if that would make things awkward on a
laptop connecting to different wireless sites.
Are all these Gnome packages real dependencies for
network-manager-gnome, or are they just selected by some other means?
Is there an alternative network manager for XFCE, and can one be
selected during initial installation?
Thanks for any help.
Cheers, Oli
There are a lot of alternatives, but the decision tree for getting through the
choices may not be easy for you unless you know just what you want.
You don't get to pick-and-choose which network manager you want with which DE --
not during the d-i process. The easiest way to manage this is to *not* install
the desktop environment. I'm not sure, but that may require that you use the
Expert install procedure. I just don't know. I've never used the regular procedure.
Anyway, if you uncheck the Desktop environment installation at software
installation selection time, you'll wind up following the reboot at TTY1 --
simply because no GUI has been installed. You will then have to log in as root
(or use sudo if you elected during installation not to allow login as root) to
install the DE in a somewhat piecemeal fashion.
Here's my somewhat disjointed notes on what got installed from aptitude on TTY1:
* Desktop Environment and Desktop Manager
* xfce4
* lightdm
* xfce4 enhancements
* xfce4-goodies
* xfce4-power-manager
* xfce4-mixer
* xfce4-terminal
* xfce text editor
* mousepad
* office applications
* libreoffice-gtk
* xfce inter-application / inter-system communications
* dbus-x11
* support for scanners
* xsane
* media players
* parole (standard Xfce choices applications for this are vlc and quodlibet)
* pdf viewer
* evince-gtk
* icon theme
* tango-icon-theme
* network management
* wicd (replacement for standard Xfce choice, network-manager-gnome, which has
dependency issues right now)
* package management
* synaptic
I'm pretty sure a lot of that (after xfce4, lightdm, and xfce-goodies) was
pulled in automatically by xfce4. Exceptions would be libreoffice-gtk, parole
(or vlc and quodlibet), evince-gtk, wicd, synaptice (not sure about this one).
Wicd is an easy-to-use network manager that I think suits Xfce better than
network-manager-gnome, but network-manager-gnome has plugins for using VPNs
though its graphical interface, and that's a very valuable thing to have. I'll
probably go back to those systems this weekend, rip out wicd, and put in
network-manager-gnome, but with only selected recommends. We were just too tired
and dumb at the end of installations to be in a pick-and-choose mode.
So, you could try using apt-get or aptitude or synaptic to install
network-manager-gnome without the recommends and just add the ones you need
manually. The only disadvantage to this is that manually installed packages
don't get cleaned up by package management when you remove whatever it was you
installed them to support.
*Or* if it turns out that Xfce is actually usable from the login screen after
the installer finishes installing it and all of the gnome stuff, you could just
use it and let gnome sit there until (we hope) aptitude / synaptic offers to
remove it when task-xfce-desktop gets upgraded to a version that doesn't want
all of the gnome stuff any more.
As I've said elsewhere in the thread, we just started over from scratch and went
with Xfce only because we really, really didn't want gnome on these systems.
I hope this is helpful. I think we can probably count on the Debian xfce / lxde
maintainers to figure out a fix in a reasonable amount of time, so just going
with the flow may work for you. On the other hand, the only slightly harder path
that I outlined isn't really that bad, and you might enjoy the experience.
I love screwing stuff up and fixing it.
Regards,
Jape
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