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Re: Aptitude wants to remove all of gnome by Telemachus » 2009-05-12 12:09 moezzie wrote:Hey there guys!I recently installed Debian Lenny on my desktop, ive been running Debian etch on my server for quite some time now and i love it.Anyways, everything worked find till i had to install build essential( aptitude install build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r) ) for my nvidia drivers. Upon looking though the list of components up for installation and removal i notice that the removal list was huge. I thought this was kind of odd but still trusted aptitude to do the right thing so i hit enter. After everything finished pretty much all of gnome was gone...So i went ahead and aptitude install gnome, and i got pretty much all of my packages back, except there are still about 330 packages in my aptitude removal list.Aptitude seems to think that they are unnecessary and wants to remove them all. The list contains everything from gnome-network-manager to xsane to gedit...How can i tell aptitude otherwise? Thanks in advance!This is a well-known issue. In a nutshell, you installed Gnome via a metapackage. Metapackages are wrappers that help you to install and update a huge collection of items easily. The price you pay is that each of the individual packages is required in order for aptitude to keep all the rest. Therefore, if you remove even a small, apparently inconsequential piece of Gnome (which you probably did inadvertently), aptitude will cheerfully tell you "Ok, Gnome's got to go."

So, to avoid problem #3b: Just remember that what Linux seems to be now is not what Linux was in the past. The largest and most necessary part of the Linux community, the hackers and the developers, like Linux because they can fit it together the way they like; they don't like it in spite of having to do all the assembly before they can use it.

So whilst vi has an interface that is hideously unfriendly to new users, it is still in use today because it is such a superb interface once you know how it works. Firefox was created by people who regularly browse the Web. The Gimp was built by people who use it to manipulate graphics files. And so on.

However, there is an important difference between a FOSS programmer and most commercial software writers: The software a FOSS programmer creates is software that he intends to use. So whilst the end result might not be as 'comfortable' for the novice user, they can draw some comfort in knowing that the software is designed by somebody who knows what the end-users needs are: He too is an end-user. This is very different from commercial software writers, who are making software for other people to use: They are not knowledgeable end-users.