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Pruning an installation


Chris H
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In my usual haste I've installed everything I could lay my hands on and would like to know if there's an easy way of pruning things.

 

For a start I installed a KDE version, then installed the Gnome and XFCE desktops. What's the possibility of just returning to a virgin Gnome install?

 

Reason why is that there are one or two niggly things that I'm convinced are down to installing too much!

 

Ta.

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To remove KDE, you could try:

 

urpme task-kde

 

assuming of course it is task-kde and not task-kde3 or whatever else. You can check that though with:

 

rpm -qa | grep -i task | grep -i kde

 

from a console prompt and see what is listed.

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OK, well, this is a command I tend to use. First, I do:

 

rpm -qa | grep -i kde

 

to filter all packages installed with kde in the name. Check the list and make sure they are all the packages you want to remove and then:

 

rpm -e `rpm -qa | grep -i kde`

 

will do that same filter within them single slanted quotes, and the rpm -e will remove them. Just be very careful if you do that, so you don't remove something you don't want to remove.

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If you use Mandriva 2009, you can do this:

urpmi task-gnome
urpme task-kde3 task-kde3-devel task-kde4 task-kde4-devel task-kde4-minimal task-xfce task-xfce-devel task-xfce-minimal task-xfce-plugins
urpme --auto-orphans

Take care: the first line is very important! Without task-gnome installed, you'll have your Gnome desktop removed as well.

 

Yves.

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I had (at one time, not so long ago) KDE3, KDE4, Gnome, XFCE4, LXDE, Fluxbox, E17, Awesome 2 and FVWM-Crystal installed on my main box, without encountering any problems.

Currently, I have just XFCE4 and LXDE (without reinstalling the OS), and I had no real problems- just minor cleanups.

All that means: How do you define "installing too much"?

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If you use Mandriva 2009, you can do this:

urpmi task-gnome
urpme task-kde3 task-kde3-devel task-kde4 task-kde4-devel task-kde4-minimal task-xfce task-xfce-devel task-xfce-minimal task-xfce-plugins
urpme --auto-orphans

Take care: the first line is very important! Without task-gnome installed, you'll have your Gnome desktop removed as well.

 

Yves.

Same as above, it's just removed the metapackage, not all the packages called by it.

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One reason for wanting to do this is that ever since loading xfce my pc no longer detects cameras, digikam now crashes and picasa takes yonks to pull the pictures over. Was working fine beforehand.

 

May be something to do with this daemon being removed, notification-daemon-0.3.90-0.r3017.1mdv2009.0.i586 to make way for an xfce one? And I can't reinstall it as urpmi threatens to remove most of my gnome packages at the same time for some reason.

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OK, well, this is a command I tend to use. First, I do:

 

rpm -qa | grep -i kde

 

to filter all packages installed with kde in the name. Check the list and make sure they are all the packages you want to remove and then:

 

rpm -e `rpm -qa | grep -i kde`

 

will do that same filter within them single slanted quotes, and the rpm -e will remove them. Just be very careful if you do that, so you don't remove something you don't want to remove.

 

Removes nothing because of failed dependencies.

 

Could force it I suppose?

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All that means: How do you define "installing too much"?

 

in my case that means that whenever i do a system upgrade i scratch my head thinking why i am pulling down a lot of package for software that i don't recognize. i understand dependencies but i am assuming that most of those are small libraries instead of big multi-megabyte files. :)

 

ciao!

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« urpme --auto-orphans »

Same as above, it's just removed the metapackage, not all the packages called by it.

Strange… The disapearance of the meta-packages should have made all of these meta-packages' dependencis “orphansâ€. Thus, the last line I gave should have removed all you wanted to, provided you use Mandriva 2009 of course.

 

I don't understand. Something must have evolved, as this behaviour was a surprise to some people. If so, I hope Mandriva came up with an alternative way of achieving this usefull task.

 

Yves.

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In case that's any help to you, here's a script I wrote that achieves more or less what --auto-orphans does, and suggests things you could try to remove to achieve your goal:

 

#!/bin/bash
# $1: task meta-package (eg: task-kde4)

read -a packages < <( \
 urpmq --requires "$1" 2>/dev/null | tr '|' '\n' \
 | while read p; do
  rpm -q "$p" &>/dev/null && { rpm -q --whatrequires "$p" &>/dev/null || echo "$p"; }
done \
 | sort -u \
)

read -p "Remove those ? $1 ${packages[*]} (y/n)" ynAns
[ "$ynAns" == "y" ] && urpme "$1" "${packages[@]}"

echo Top 20 packages to remove in priority:
urpmq --requires "$1" 2>/dev/null | tr '|' '\n' \
| while read p; do
LANGUAGE=C rpm -q "$p" 2>&1 | grep -vF 'is not installed' && { LANGUAGE=C rpm -q --whatrequires "$p" | grep -vF 'no package requires'; }
 done \
| sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -n 20

 

Be sure to review the lists presented to you, because those come straight from dependency checking, without any sanity check. Eg: don't go and remove bash, or basesystem, or glibc… Usage example: /path/to/script.sh task-kde4

 

Yves.

Edited by theYinYeti
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