Removing gnome or KDE

desertViking · 2006-01-30 00:51:21

Hi,

I've been working on a laptop the last week or so. Arch works really well on this one. It's about 5 years old (no USB ports if that give you an idea :-) ) I'm able load only what I need.

At any rate, while experimenting, I loaded KDE, and gnome. I've found that the lighter windows managers work better.

I'm considering removing gnome at least. I don't think I'll be using it, so why take up the disk space and worry about upgrades?

Is this like open heart surgery, or will pacman -R gnome-extra gnome manage things without to much damage?

How 'bout KDE?

These things seem to have their fingers into all parts of the system.

Thx in advance.

Cerebral · 2006-01-30 01:00:48

To remove a group (which kde and gnome are) do the following:

pacman -Rg gnome
pacman -Rg kde

And answer Y when it asks to remove whole content. If there are conflicts (ie. some app you use depends on one of the KDE or gnome packages) then pacman should tell you and refuse to remove the group. Then you can selectively remove packages from the group that you don't want to keep.

For example, on my system, if I try to remove KDE:

$ sudo pacman -Rg kde
:: group kde:
    arts gwenview kde-common kdebase kdelibs 
    Remove whole content? [Y/n] 
error: this will break the following dependencies:
  kdelibs: is required by k3b

$

So, then, I'd say "well geez, I wanna keep k3b" and issue

pacman -R arts gwenview kde-common kdebase

Of course, this is a bad example, because eventually k3b requires kdelibs, and kdelibs requires arts, and arts requires kde-common... lol

Long post short, yes, pacman is really good about taking care of dependancies, and won't let you proceed if you try to break dependancies, unless you specify the -f flag (force.)

Additionally, if you use -Rs, it'll remove the package and all packages that it depends on but nothing else depends on. If you use -Rc, it'll remove that package and all packages depending on it. They're powerful, but be careful with 'em, 'cause they can remove tons of apps when using them on a group like KDE or Gnome.

Eg:

$ sudo pacman -Rgsc kde
Password:
:: group kde:
    arts gwenview kde-common kdebase kdelibs 
    Remove whole content? [Y/n] 

Targets: k3b libmpcdec taglib ffmpeg libdts faac a52dec sox cdrtools cdrdao 
          kdebase libxdamage damageproto libxcomposite compositeproto 
          libraw1394 mtools gwenview kdelibs acl attr libidn fam portmap jasper 
          openexr arts kde-common archlinux-menus 

Do you want to remove these packages? [Y/n]

desertViking · 2006-01-30 02:30:41

Thank-you, friend.

Gullible Jones · 2006-01-30 03:29:07

If you wish to remove the groups dependencies, add 's'. If you wish to remove things that depend on packages in the group, add 'c'. If you do not wish to save config files outside of home dirs, add 'n'. Thus, to wipe every single trace of Gnome and everything related to it off your system, do

# pacman -Rgscn gnome

(This is one of the things I love about pacman. With the other package management utilities I've used, removing dependencies is quite annoying. Pacman makes it easy.)

desertViking · 2006-01-30 04:01:29

This looks like it should be manageable. Thanks for your advice!

Kind regards.

Arch Linux

#1 2006-01-30 00:51:21

Removing gnome or KDE

#2 2006-01-30 01:00:48

Re: Removing gnome or KDE

#3 2006-01-30 02:30:41

Re: Removing gnome or KDE

#4 2006-01-30 03:29:07

Re: Removing gnome or KDE

#5 2006-01-30 04:01:29

Re: Removing gnome or KDE

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