Can't remove gnome install.

[Donatas G.]

On the whole issue of gnome removal:

A clean way of maintaining your system is this: keep track of every install operation :)

I have a file where I paste output of every apt-get install/remove/autoremove operation for this.

An alternative way is relying on autoremove feature of apt-get, but it may only work when you use apt-get exclusively. Aptitude must have a feature 
like this (even before apt-get got it). I am not sure how well the Adept is developed and whether it integrates with either of the mentioned programs 
in this respect.

"apt-get --purge remove packagename" command will not help you: the only difference with simple remove is, that it ALSO deletes the configuration 
files that you might have changed after install (so it purges the customized settings of the program). 

There might be some complicated way of removing all the dependences of a metapackage, but it must really be complicated. You have to write a shell 
script that will:

1. List all packages in a metapackage like ubuntu-desktop and dependencies of those included packages
2. Substract from that list the packages that are included in the metapackages you want to keep (I am not sure, but there may be packages shared by 
both kubuntu-desktop and ubuntu-desktop)
3. apply "apt-get remove" to the resulting list. 

If anyone wrote such script, I would invite him/her for beer for sure!

But till then, and since I don't really trust "apt-get autoremove", I write logs :)

Donatas Glodenis

P.S. Could anyone tell me whether I could make apt-get log it's operations automatically?