Removing undesired desktops

[dtoffe]

Hi,
I have these desktop to choose in the login dialog: Cinnamon, Gnome, Gnome Classic, Mate, System Default and TWM. I just want to have Cinnamon and Mate, guess System Default is just a shortcut, Gnome refers to Gnome 3 and Gnome Classic to Gnome 2, and I'm not sure about the dependencies of Cinnamon and Mate with Gnome2/3.
It is safe to uninstall TWM and Gnome 3 ???
Cheers,
Daniel

[Danko8321]

Ummm... What version of Mint are you using and how much have you tweaked it? You have more sessions that I've ever had and make reference to either GDM 2.2 (Which is unsupported and quite old) or MDM (which is only available on Mint Debian (AKA LMDE) and that's no OS for newbies). The problem is that LMEDdoesn't have Gnome Shell installed by default (thus no "Gnome Session" or "Gnome Classic") and I don't really know what TWM is but it doesn't come by default in any Mint install I've ever had. Again, what version of Mint are you using, what did you install and, if you can, could you add a screenshot of your login screen?

Thanks and sorry for all the requests; it is just that you have a very interesting yet bizarre case going on here

[dtoffe]

Ummm... What version of Mint are you using and how much have you tweaked it? You have more sessions that I've ever had and make reference to either GDM 2.2 (Which is unsupported and quite old) or MDM (which is only available on Mint Debian (AKA LMDE) and that's no OS for newbies). The problem is that LMEDdoesn't have Gnome Shell installed by default (thus no "Gnome Session" or "Gnome Classic") and I don't really know what TWM is but it doesn't come by default in any Mint install I've ever had. Again, what version of Mint are you using, what did you install and, if you can, could you add a screenshot of your login screen?
Thanks and sorry for all the requests; it is just that you have a very interesting yet bizarre case going on here

No problem, I should have been more precise from the beginning. I started installing Debian stable (6.0), then upgraded to testing, and then with help from this forum I added multimedia and Mint repos. After that I installed Cinnamon and Mate. I guess that explains the unusual setup.
Many menu entries are duplicated and examining them I've found that for each pair one entry comes from Mate and the other from Gnome. I would like to get rid of those dupes and uninstall the desktops that I will not use.
I'm sure I'm not able to remove all gnome because of dependencies from Cinnamon and Mate, but if I understand it right, they don't depend on gnome 3 and it could be safely removed, is this right ?
Perhaps it would have been easier to install LMDE from the start, I'm still playing with this box until I find I know it and I like it enough to be there for years.
Thanks,
Daniel

[zerozero]

hi Daniel.
the joys of tweaking and breaking stuff
- gnome (aka gnome-shell) is gnome3;
- gnome-classic (aka fallback-mode) is gnome3;
- cinnamon depends on gnome3;
- mate is independent from gnome3 (in fact being gnome2 renamed can co-exist in the same installation, or be removed safely)
- twm shouldn't have any deps on gnome3 (never tried it) but i believe is a very small install and you probably going to need a stable fallback system for when testing goes unfrozen (june next year, after debian7 release)

with this in mind (and knowing that you want to keep cinnamon and mate), you can (if you really want)
- uninstall gnome-session-fallback (this way eliminating the gnome-classic entry in gdm3) but if you have an issue with your graphic-card drivers this is the safest session to have (together with mate)
- there's ways to unistall mate (and it's both safe and efficient) but that's not what you want
- cinnamon can also be unistalled safely (it depends on gnome but has not the other way around) but again you want to keep it

just don't get to excited unistalling stuff because that is one of quickest ways to break the system.

[xenopeek]

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