Xserver fails to load after removing optional packages

[Brian49]

I'm fairly sure that this piece of weirdness is peculiar to my system and not a problem with LMDE as such, but I would be very grateful for any advice, please.

Recently I've been removing some unwanted packages from my system. They are optional packages; they don't come ready installed, and as far as I can see, removing them shouldn't affect anything else on the system - but it does. After removing the two packages gnome-specimen (a font preview utility) and simple-scan (a scanning utility), the Xserver failed to load the next time I tried to boot up the computer. I went through this routine a couple more times to make sure that the removal of these packages was indeed the trigger for the failure.

Can anyone suggest what might be going on here, please? Tracking Debian Unstable, with most updates installed and only about a dozen or so Gnome-related packages pinned. There were no warnings of possible issues when I removed the two packages via Synaptic. Using the 'free' Radeon driver. Many thanks.

[rhodry]

Try having a read through 'man apt-cache' and 'man apt-get'. Apart from finding all sorts of useful stuff to learn, you will see that you can find the packages that a particular package depends on as well as the packages that depend on it. You do this before trying package management where you are not sure of the outcome. You can also run "apt remove" with the -s option. That does a simulation of proposed actions without actually affecting your system.

for example:

Code: Select all

$ apt-cache depends gnome-specimen
gnome-specimen
  Depends: python
  Depends: python-support
  Depends: gconf2
  Depends: python-glade2
  Depends: python-gnome2
  Depends: python-gtk2
$ apt-cache rdepends gnome-specimen
gnome-specimen
Reverse Depends:
  open-font-design-toolkit

cheers,
rhodry.

[Brian49]

Thanks for the suggestion. But now I'm more puzzled then ever, because running apt-cache depends confirms that the two packages I tried to remove shouldn't affect the Xserver. As I mentioned, Synaptic didn't give any warning of trouble either, which it usually does if there are possible complications with a removal.