Comments on: How to remove Mono from Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala [Updated]

By: Chris Hall

Chris Hall — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 22:50:44 +0000

@Alan, remember that you told me of gNewSense? Well Alan, remember that you told me of gNewSense? Well I can “cross-grade” from “Lenny” to gNewSense 3.x and the developers provide instructions; thanks for the heads-up.
Once “Lenny’s” exactly as I want it, I’ll change over. Again, thank you.

By: Chris Hall

Chris Hall — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 22:33:24 +0000

You’re welcome @Alan :]

Anything else? Oh, make sure that you have ‘gnome-core’ installed as most Debian based Distros install Gnome as a “meta-package”

And Debfoster and Deborpan have been depriciated by Debians developers for 5.x.x (Lenny)

By: Alan Lord

Alan Lord — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 14:15:57 +0000

Thanks @Chris,

Nice and clean instructions.

By: Chris Hall

Chris Hall — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 14:03:15 +0000

‘aptitude purge f-spot* tomboy* libmono* mono-common* libgtk2 libglib2′

‘aptitude purge -c’

‘aptitude clean’

and that’ll remove Mono and ALL related dependancies :]

By: Chris Hall

Chris Hall — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 22:11:20 +0000

Seems that doing several rounds of ‘deborphan –guess-all | xargs apt-get remove’ was correct after all. However, Debfoster’s more efficient at purging unwanted packages (and keeping them removed).

More on Debfoster tomorrow, sleep beckons.

By: Mirco Bauer

Mirco Bauer — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 21:44:34 +0000

Hm, if you want a really free operating system, to my knowledge that doesn’t exist yet… oh wait, *BSD should be as it’s purely based on the BSD licenses which has no restrictions at all (except retaining copyright lines, more free it can’t get).

By: Chris Hall

Chris Hall — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 19:14:25 +0000

Alan, yes I am though gNewSense is not totally free as it has the Mono Libraries intact and uses gnome, and the gnome developers are not committed to removing Mono packages, components, dependancies or libraries. Xfce have stated they will reman Mono free. I like total control over my distro hence doing this the “hard way”.

Looking at the earlier solution, that won’t work, not on Debian or ubuntu as the configuration files are still in the distro. To totally purge Mono, we need to install Debfoster and Deborphan with ‘apt-get install debfoster deborphan’.

More later, once I’ve learned the required commands and purged my distro.

By: Alan Lord

Alan Lord — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 15:50:59 +0000

Hmm. Just in case, are you aware of distros like gNewSense that aim to be really Free?

By: Chris Hall

Chris Hall — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 15:46:27 +0000

Quote, “From what I can tell apt-get purge is functionally the same as apt-get remove –purge” Well, just because something’s functionally the same doesn’t mean the result will be identical

Hmm…
Looks like a visit to Debians forums and using VirtualBox are both required as i‘ve not used Debian since 3.0…
Don’t just want an xfce desktop, I want to totally remove all Mono packages, libraries and components as I’m building a distro based on totally free (as in speech) packages.

Since I want to remove both libgtk2 and libglib2, the command ‘apt-get purge libmono* libgdiplus cli-common libsqlite0 libglitz-glx1 libglitz1’ plus ‘apt-get remove –purge mono-common libmono0 mono libmono1.0-cil libmono2.0-cil’ should do the job nicely.

Not worried about breaking anything…

Thanks for the help Alan, will let you know how I fare.

By: Alan Lord

Alan Lord — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 07:53:29 +0000

I haven’t run Debian for quite a while now so I can’t be sure, but the basic idea is sound. From what I can tell, apt-get purge is functionally the same as apt-get remove --purge. The trick is listing the right packages that are the core dependencies. When I prepare these posts, I build a default desktop installation in a Virtual Machine and test it all there first.

If all you want is an xfce based desktop, you could try building the system from the very minimal network install image and build it up with just the packages you want.