Uninstalling Desktop Environments

[thkang]

hi,

Originally I installed Fedora 17 original one (that with Gnome) on my laptop but out of curiosity I have several other DEs on my laptop as well.

What I did is :

yum groupinstall LXDE
yum groupinstall FXCE

also I have MATE on my laptop, following the guide on forum.
since they were just installed for curiosity and I don't use anything other than Gnome practically, I'd like to have them removed. My GDM tells there are 7 DEs - openbox, gnome, lxde, fxce, mate, gnome fallback, xbmc. I can't even tell where the hell openbox came from.

I tried removing unused DEs with Add/Remove Software -> uncheck lxde/fxce/mate in "package collections" list, and the add/remove software tells me that it has to remove other packages as well, namely nautilus, gdm, etc. Is it okay to just click okay? I'm very scared about this.

[flyingfsck]

No, I won't try to remove a DE. One can uninstall a simple program, but trying to uninstall a DE is like trying to unscramble an egg - it can't be expected to work properly.

[elias12]

Originally Posted by thkang

hi,


What I did is :

yum groupinstall LXDE
yum groupinstall FXCE

This will install the mentioned Desktop-Environments and all his dependencies. If you want to remove one or more DE be carefully because some dependencies belongs to Gnome too e.g. GDM or teminal for example.

You need to reinstall with the command groupinstall your favourite DE otherwise your system will broken next startup.

 
yum groupinstall gnome

install the Gnome DE with all his dependencies.

List of all the available groups:

yum grouplist | less

or

yum groupinfo PACKAGENAME

yum groupremove PACKAGENAME

Will remove the group e.g. LXDE with all his dependencies.

Hope this helps

[bkahuna]

openbox is the window manager for lxde. tidbits.

[bendib]

You can yank out GDM if you have replaced it with SLiM, which I do, but you probably need it. You can also tear out most KDE stuff with yum remove kdebase kdelibs. yum remove gnome-shell is all I'd advise for nuking gnome, since it has some useful (but not critical that can't be substituted) stuff, like file-roller which works better than Xarchiver.