On Tuesday 13 November 2012 09:44:16 Bev Nicolson wrote:
I think the time has come. Yesterday 11.10 'uninstalled' Libre Office off its own bat. Nul points and a bit worrying.
So, without wishing to turn this thread into a discussion over which distro to go for, and without installing it over Ubuntu which I'd rather not do, how do I swap? I've used Ubuntu for ages now so I've no idea who to go about this.
Bev.
What you do is get a Debian install CD. At this point I would go for 'testing'. Then you just install, being very careful at the disk partitioning stage to mark the /home partition as NOT to be formatted.
If you have never done this before, make sure everything is backed up first.
Then, use Synaptic to install xfce4, and you will basically have your gnome back. While you are installing gnome, I would install fluxbox as well. Its far and away the best user interface. But, it will take a bit of getting used to.
You probably have to hack gdm2 manually to make sure it starts with xfce as default. They seem to have taken all the configuration options out of it. Crazy people. Google for it, it just editing a text file. Personally I use lxdm as the display manager and have got rid of gdm.
Here is where to get Testing
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/
Al