Thanks Marius,
This is short top-post because I won't respond inline to your valuable
comments and suggestions at the moment. However, I didn't want you think
I wasn't paying attention! I am grateful for your input.
I often run virtual machines on that particular system, so I ought to be
able to do a clean install under unity to get both full package lists,
because I have now upgraded my desktop system in-place to 17.04.
Unfortunately, that particular machine dropped dead suddenly at the
weekend and it looks as if I need a new computer (it was 12 years old).
Once I have that unplanned activity sorted out, I'll let you know how I
get on with the desktop change.
This laptop runs ubuntu studio 17.04, with lightdm and xfce4, so I
couldn't easily use it to test (besides, I need to do some problem
determination on why bcmwl-kernel-source has broken my laptop wifi!).
Don't hold your breath, but I WILL reply to you properly once my
technical life is back under control.
Thanks again,
Brian
p.s. your suggestions are OK for me, but not for most of the ordinary
users. It's a pity we can't come up with something safe and easy.
On 27/04/17 22:45, Marius Gedminas wrote:
On Thu, Apr 20, 2017 at 02:17:26PM +1000, Brian Burch wrote:
On 17/04/17 18:10, Pander wrote:
To remove Unity, I simply use dpkg -P packagenames. When that list
becomes long from many dependencies, I put the output of that
through grep to get all the depending packages and cat those to a
file. Edit the file (vim and a lot of Shift-j) and put dpkg -P at
the beginning. I use the same trick for ouput of dpkg -l|grep -v ^ii
Of course, check if those lists of package names are okay to purge
before doing bulk purges. Some packages are tricky, see my post a
while back on Unity dependencies.
Thanks for your suggestion, Pander. I did something fairly similar to that
in the past. If I decide to go ahead this time, then I will follow your plan
because it seems simpler than what I did before.
However, I was hoping to receive advice that would be attractive and useful
to people who are not as confident as us with these low-level tools.
Am I correct in thinking the "old method" of installing gnome-desktop
alongside unity has become too complex to be worth trying?
Have you tried it?
I did that a long time ago and it worked for me. I haven't had the
chance to try it lately.
Installing the gnome metapackage and removing the unity metapackage
ought to suffice, IMHO. You might need to hunt down some other packages
that differ between Unity and GNOME (e.g. the bootsplash theme).
If I weren't a lazy person, I'd install both in two virtual machines,
then compare the lists of installed packages (e.g. dpkg -l) so I would
know which ones to install and remove to turn one into the other.
I tried "sudo dpkg --purge --dry-run unity" (-P is the same as --purge) on
my xenial system "just for fun", but it bombed out with a "too many
dependencies" error. However, it didn't list ANY of them!
dpkg is too low-level for this; don't use it. apt purge exists these
days, and it deals with dependencies correctly.
(AFAIU the only reason to remove/purge Unit packages is in case they
install some system-wide gsettings override files that change some GNOME
settings defaults to Unity defaults. )
Perhaps I should just wait for the next ubuntu release and hope there will
be a more straightforward conversion path?
A full reinstall is always a good way to test your backup completeness
;)
Marius Gedminas
--
Ubuntu-GNOME mailing list
Ubuntu-GNOME@lists.ubuntu.com
Modify settings or unsubscribe at:
https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-gnome
