Software update wants to pull in Gnome?

[Losgann]

Hi, I have just installed LMDE 201204 XFCE. The icon in the notification area says there are updates, so I open up the update manager and click on install updates. It thinks for a while, and then a box pops up saying "this update will trigger additional changes", and proceeds to tell me that 28 packages will be removed, including what appear to be some XFCE packages (eg. xfce4-xfapplet-plugin), and that 193 packages will be installed, including a whole pile of Gnome applications like gnome-shell, gnome-panel, gnome-control-center, metacity, mutter, etc. In other words it looks like it wants to pull in Gnome, basically. But I don't want Gnome on the system, just XFCE. Anybody have any idea why this is, or what I should do? I hit cancel, and haven't installed any updates yet. Thanks for any help or suggestions.

[zerozero]

before you update do the following test

Code: Select all

dpkg --get-selections | grep nautilus

and see which nautilus-related lib you can safely remove

[Losgann]

When I do that I get the following list: nautilus, nautilus-data, nautilus open-terminal, nautilus-sendto, and libnautilus-extension1a. I wonder why Nautilus is even there in an XFCE environment? Anyway, I tried marking Nautilus for removal in Synaptic, and a pop-up informed me that doing so will cause an additional 12 files to be installed, all of them lib... files (libpoppler19, libcamel, libecal, libedataserver, etc.). I don't know what all those are, though I'm assuming "lib" stands for "library". Is it safe to proceed with that?

[zerozero]

answering the first question: why nautilus in a xfce distro?
we have to go back to the release notes
http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1708
http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1725
there we can see that this xfce build was made in a way to "mimic" the main ed so to say.

about those removals: what i can see there are evolution related libraries.

[Losgann]

Thanks for the quick response. Really what I'm asking is, is it safe to remove or will I bork stuff if I do? Or should I just let Gnome be installed and sit there? I've got the disk space to spare, I just didn't see the point in having a DE that I don't use hanging around.

[zerozero]

if it was me (but be careful here) i would remove nautilus and affiliates lib (as far as i can recall there's one that would be hard to remove, if not impossible but it should be more or less obvious when you see the popup in synaptic asking to remove as well gnome-keyring and some related networkmanager packages << that library has to stay )

i would remove it basically because later nautilus would cause some troubles in xfce taking over the handling of the desktop, messing your settings. it's not a good neighbor

[Losgann]

OK, thank you for the info.