On 10/06/2013 05:33 PM, david...@ling.ohio-state.edu wrote:
On Sun, 6 Oct 2013, Jape Person wrote:
For both stable and testing I tried both LXDE and Xfce desktop
environment installations. But when the systems rebooted, I was at
the Gnome desktop.
you do not mention the display manager.
at login, did the display manager's login dialog box not offer you a
choice of DE?
is it possible that it did offer you a choice (via, say, a drop-down
menu or something), with gnome pre-selected as the default?
No, I suppose I should have mentioned that. The default choice (from lightdm)
was "default xsession". The only other choice in the dropdown on the login was
gnome. I didn't see Xfce listed at all.
I think that was on the stable installations. I didn't even check when I saw
gnome pop up after logging on on the subsequent attempts to install LXDE or Xfce
stable or testing installations. I just started over, because I didn't want to
leave these folks with systems that had so much extraneous stuff on them. I
mean, it was hundreds of megabytes, not just a few packages. It was the whole
gnome DE.
While doing routine upgrades on my own systems I had run into a
situation somewhat related and reported by someone else at
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=718855.
it kinda sounds like you ran into the *identical* situation. but
without knowing what options the display manager offered you, i guess
i shouldn't be too certain.
hth,
wes
ps: i did a recent install for a friend, as well, and i believe we ran
into bug #718855, too. it does break the principle of least surprise,
but it did not prevent us from selecting an xfce session from the
display manager. (at least, i don't *think* i had to do anything more
fu-intensive than select xfce from a drop-down in the DM greeter.
memory is a little fuzzy.)
That's very interesting. On the early installations done this weekend I added
some software from within aptitude in TTY1 before trying to log on. I wonder if
that variable had anything to do with the difference. I did not test the
dropdown on all cases, just the first. I assumed that the subsequent ones would
be the same. Gnome was there, and I didn't want it to be there.
Still, even if one were to be given the choice of logging on to an Xfce session,
how many people would be happy with this outcome of the installation process? I
mean, I guess most people go with LXDE or Xfce because they don't want something
as big as gnome or kde sitting on their systems.
Of course, I don't try to extrapolate from the behavior of my own testing
installations wrt bugs because I fiddle mightily with them. I installed them
early in the Squeeze testing cycle, and set sources.list to use testing instead
of the current testing name ever since. So, they just roll right over to the new
testing when it comes along. I'm used to seeing occasional breakage on them,
like when framebuffer came along and nv went away. Those systems get updated at
least once a day, and I add and subtract reams of packages frequently for
testing purposes. But I've never seen them go through something quite as ugly as
this. It wasn't hard to fix, but I'm sure it would really mess up a new user.
Attempting to get a clean Xfce and / or LXDE installation from both stable and
testing and getting hundreds of megabytes of gnome is just weird. I can see how
it happens, but I wouldn't think that the Xfce or LXDE maintainers would be very
happy about it. Yet I don't see any comments from them on the bug report.
If I get time this week I may just do some testing of the installation process
to confirm what I remember. (Remember, lots of wine, lots of food, lots of
screaming kids...) Anyway, looks like Debian is aware of it.
Thank you for your observation. It's given me something to mull over.
Jape
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