Group items tagged

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."

The kernel makes its services available to the application programs that run on it through a large collection of entry points, known technically as system calls.

From a programmer's viewpoint, these look just like ordinary function calls, although in reality a system call involves a distinct switch in the operating mode of the processor from user space to kernel space. Together, the repertoire of system calls provides a 'Linux virtual machine', which can be thought of as an abstraction of the underlying hardware.

An even less visible function of the kernel, even to programmers, is memory management. Each process runs under the illusion that it has an address space (a valid range of memory addresses) to call its own.

Richard M Stallman has made it clear many times, "A hacker is someone who enjoys playful cleverness—not necessarily with computers. The programmers in the old MIT free software community of the 60s and 70s referred to themselves as hackers. Around 1980, journalists who discovered the hacker community mistakenly took the term to mean “security breaker.”