Thank you, everyone who offered suggestions and observations. I've got KDE working, basically by using aptitude to remove the remaining bits of gnome, and then (re)installing the kde meta-packages.
On Nov 28 2006, Tim Post wrote: > On Mon, 2006-11-27 at 16:55 -0800, Arlie Stephens wrote: > > I made the mistake of selecting 'workstation' when installing etch. It > > managed to do the X installation correctly, without needing to be > > rescued manually, which is way better than I've seen from earlier > > debians. That's the good news. The _bad_ news is that it installed > > gnome, and apparantly only gnome. > > I've done that .. especially when tired and needing to deploy a bunch of > desktops. > > > I used aptitude to select any packages that looked like they might be > > part of kde, and remove any packages that looked like they might be > > part of the guts of gnome. The result is a mess. I appear to be > > running kdm (according to ps), but the result has the look and feel of > > nothing much. If it's kde, it's sure changed - a lot. > > You may have inadvertently installed a very broken KDE which would be > hard to do. Aptitude goes to some lengths to try and stop you from > breaking anything, and the KDE packages have very intricately woven > inter-dependencies. I think this is precisely what I did, probably by not using the highest level metapackages - and also by not completely extirpating gnome first - I didn't know to look for things with names like 'nautilus'. > That being said, apparently you have found just the right combination of > packages to install that results in something pretty useless. You may > want to do a dpkg -l and send the output to the KDE developers, they may > be interested to see your packages so that they can adjust dependencies > thus preventing someone else from making the same mistake. > > Just dpkg -l > /root/package.report.txt and send it along to them if you > have time, with a screen shot of the current "mess" and description of > it. Unfortunately, I'd already started tinkering by the time I got this message. I'm pretty sure I'd done something like installing kdm and kde-core, rather than kde, but I'm not sure precisely what. Unfortunately, that's not enough for a useful bug report, short of trying to break things again - and I'm also uncertain whether I was the only contributor to the resulting mess. (A coworker had attempted to fix things using some GUI tool he found in X/gnome - which wound up claiming that kde could not be found, after first offering to install it - and may have messed up a few things while coming to this conclusion. At that point, I took over, and switched to aptitude...) > Hopefully it results in a stable box. I think, personally .. I'd just > repave the machine if possible just to ensure no "oddities" result, but > I understand your reluctance to completely re-install Debian. Messes > like this are rather aggravating. I may yet wind up restarting from scratch, but I'm going to make sure I find all the land mines first. I'll probably be back to the list with more questions when I hit the next one. > Hope this helps. > -Tim -- Arlie (Arlie Stephens [EMAIL PROTECTED]) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
