[vox-tech] Need some help choosing a linux flavor for an old laptop

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Ken Bloom (kbloom at gmail.com):

> No. That won't convert *anything* because all of the ubuntu-desktop 
> dependancies will still be lying around.

Hmm.  I'm having a difficult time parsing that.  You may well be right if
you mean that the constituent packages of the ubuntu-desktop metapackage 
would not be removed, only the metapackage itself.  I've never tried
such conversions:  I'd much rather build up systems from a minimal base
than create a situation where I must do mass removals.

Generally, when despite best intentions I need to remove some glob of
packages, I find I get best results (fewest surprises, leftover junk,
and unintended side-effects) by gathering target package names from a
"dpkg -l" inventory, feeding them into an "apt-get remove" command line,
and then cleaning up using deborphan and debfoster.  Fortunately, I've 
avoided the need for that ever since I figured out that GNOME and KDE
are, among other disadvantages, dependency hairballs and not worth the
pain.


> The best way is to let aptitude figure everything out at once:
> $ sudo aptitude install xubuntu-desktop ubuntu-desktop-
> 
> (The minus at the end of a package name means to uninstall, even though 
> an install statement was given)

Neat trick.  I never saw that one before.  Probably because I don't
trust aptitude (see below).

> And aptitude will take care of removing unused dependancies (i.e. unused 
> software packages that were part of ubunutu, but aren't part of 
> xubuntu)

(I think you mean "were part of the ubuntu-desktop metapackage, but
aren't part of the xubuntu-desktop one".)

I still don't trust aptitude to make package decisions for me.  I've
seen it screw up _way_ too often.  And what's this bull*** about either 
installing all Suggests: packages, or none of them?  Sorry, that's just
broken.  Fortunately, apt-get isn't.