On Thu, 2006-03-16 at 10:18 +0000, Stuart Fox wrote:

Hi all

Im new to the apt system, is ther a way to completely remove a virtual package and its dependencies?

I've just put dapper on my laptop as an experiment and I want to replace gnome with kde (not starting a gnome/kde war, i just dont like gnome) I know I *could* just leave gnome in place but it urks me having all that *stuff* under the hood that I dont want there.

Cheers

Stuart

Check out $ man apt-cache and have a look at the depends command.

Also note the --purge option of apt-get.

I think you could probably do something like this:

# apt-get remove --purge `apt-cache depends gnome-desktop-environment | sed "s/.*: (.*)$/\1/"`

You need the regex because $ apt-cache depends prints a 'nicely' formatted list.

You may need to repeat this with a couple of meta packages before its all gone.

Cheers, Richard

PS. Also check out Synaptic.