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#1 2020-09-29 04:03:42

ofvergara
Member
Registered: 2020-07-17
Posts: 14  

Beowulf: how to remove xfce and install mate, without breaking system

hello devuan team,
I have a virtualbox installation with beowulf xfce.

I want to try it with mate instead, however, as you can see above, xfce is already installed in this system.
what terminal commands or synaptic file selections do i have to add/choose/delete to remove/purge xfce and then install mate?

I hope this switch doesn't break the system.

waiting for your insightful input.
cheers.

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#2 2020-09-29 05:12:38

Dutch_Master
Member
Registered: 2018-05-31
Posts: 275  

Re: Beowulf: how to remove xfce and install mate, without breaking system

Find and install the mate-desktop meta-package in Synaptic. Mate and XFCE can happily co-exist, there's no conflict so no real reason to remove XFCE other then saving space on your virtual drive. If you still want to remove XFCE, there's an xfce-desktop package as well, see if that's installed then purge it and all of its dependencies. Synaptic is a smart tool (or rather, the underlying .deb packages) so it'll complain when you want to remove a package Mate relies on.

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#3 2020-09-29 11:55:02

bgstack15
Member
Registered: 2018-02-04
Posts: 205  

Re: Beowulf: how to remove xfce and install mate, without breaking system

The way I would try to remove xfce-desktop would be with autoremove (or autopurge).

sudo apt-get autoremove xfce-desktop

The auto part will try to clean up any packages that were not manually selected, so that would include all the components that xfce-desktop had to bring in, that you had never named specifically (or did whatever the command is to mark them as not-manually-selected).
Beware that autoremove will try to remove all packages that are not manually selected, that are not dependencies of any manually-selected packages. So it could try to remove more than intended. So just be sure to look through the list of what it wants to remove before you say yes.


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#4 2020-09-29 14:48:11

dev2cosmos
Member
Registered: 2020-09-29
Posts: 12  

Re: Beowulf: how to remove xfce and install mate, without breaking system

Drop to other tty like say tty2 and

sudo apt purge xfce4* 

  then install mate.

Removing xfce4 this way probably take with it many dependence programs, so take note or uninstall one by one i think.

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#5 2020-09-29 18:11:00

Head_on_a_Stick
Member
From: London
Registered: 2019-03-24
Posts: 3,125  
Website

Re: Beowulf: how to remove xfce and install mate, without breaking system

# aptitude install task-xfce-desktop- task-mate-desktop

Brianna Ghey — Rest In Power

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