Re: Alternate distributions

Mark,

Thanks! that's very helpful...  I was mainly curious in how to uninstall if
that was indeed what i wanted to try...  I'll most likely do a clean
install...   Like my mom always said... "there's only two ways to clean
house... one is a garage sale, the other is a house fire"....the latter
being the most effective...

TT


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mark Gordon" <[email protected]>
To: "alan" <[email protected]>
Cc: "ted targosz" <[email protected]>; <[email protected]>
Sent: Saturday, May 01, 2004 3:15 AM
Subject: Re: [Users] Alternate distributions


> On Thu, 2004-04-29 at 18:00 -0700, alan wrote:
> > On Fri, 30 Apr 2004, ted targosz wrote:
> >
> > > I'd also like to thank Mark Gordon for his enlightening discussions in
> > > other threads of this forum about the future of XD2 with regards to
> > > various distributions.
> > >
> > > I'm currently running XD2 on RH7.3 and have been delighted with it.
> > > However, RH7.3 is getting a bit long in the tooth and I'm starting to
> > > look at SUSE and Fedora as possible alternates.
> > >
> > > Fedora's FAQ suggests that XD2 should be uninstalled before an upgrade
> > > is attempted.  I'm curious what is the best method to try to do an
> > > uninstall of XD2?   Can I just fire up red carpet and uninstall a
> > > particular set of packages?  Or should I just forget about that and do
a
> > > clean install of whatever new distribution I want to try?
> >
> > A clean install is your best bet.
> >
> > XD2 introduces a whole bunch of dependancy problems that are hard to
> > resolve.  (Since you are replacing huge quantities of libraries with
> > similar, but different named libraries, it is not all that surprising.)
> >
> > It will also give you a chance to add in any of the new things that have
> > been added since 7.3.  (Quite a bit.)
>
> While a clean install may be the easiest solution, I realize it's not
> always ideal.
>
> I feel like giving some tips on the process of uninstalling XD2.
>
> - Start by backing up anything you care about.  This presumably
> includes /home, possibly /root, possibly some files in /etc.  YMMV.
> - Uninstalling Gnome while running Gnome isn't a terribly good idea.
> Work from the console or KDE or vanilla X with twm or remotely via ssh.
> - Many XD2 packages can be uninstalled without breaking anything.  Some
> XD2 packages cannot be removed without breaking something.  A few XD2
> packages cannot be removed without breaking something *critical*.
>
> The following, for example, is a *bad* idea for XD2 users:
> # rpm -qa | grep ximian | xargs rpm -e --nodeps # DO NOT RUN THIS!!!
> This is because XD2 upgraded glib, a very basic library which was once
> part of GTK+ and is now used by a many non-graphical programs.  PAM uses
> it, for example, and if you break PAM, you won't be able to log in any
> more.  That's the biggest issue.
>
> The following at least *simplifies* the situation:
> # for pkg in `rpm -qa | grep ximian`; do rpm -e --test $pkg > /dev/null
2>&1 && rpm -e $pkg; done
> This removes all Ximian packages that don't satisfy dependencies of
> other packages (assuming packages correctly report their dependencies).
> The best part is that this command can be run repeatedly, with more
> packages getting uninstalled at each iteration, up to a point.  Run it
> enough times (until it's no longer uninstalling packages), and it will
> have removed all the Ximian software that can be removed without causing
> dependency problems for something in the main distribution.
>
> At this point, run "rpm -qa | grep ximian".  It may or may not be
> necessary at this point to pipe it through less on the console; the list
> should be pretty short at that point.  There shouldn't be any apps left,
> only shared libraries and package bindings.  Now, since all those should
> be provided as part of the base OS, it should be possible to downgrade
> to the versions that came on the original install media.  This requires
> using the --oldpackage flag with rpm -Uvh.  It may be necessary to
> downgrade a number of packages atomically (i.e. downgrading multiple
> packages at once), since bindings will depend on libraries that will
> depend on lower-level libraries.
>
> -Mark Gordon
>
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