Hey all,

It's been awhile since I've posted.

I am curious as to the best and most practical way to change a desktop install into a server install. In other words, I want to get rid of X and KDE and all the extra software related to the two and have a purely command line interface.

I have discovered that having a GUI in a server context is kind of pointless, and when upgrading software requires a lot of time to upgrade the extra software related to X and KDE. I just want to clean it up and make it lean and mean.

Thanks.

I would start by removing the xorg package, which being a metapackage should remove all of the x packages.

Next, you should remove the kde package or if you don't have that metapackage then the kde-core package should get rid of KDE.

metapackages can make your life easy when it comes to removing related software packages. If you didn't install metapackages (as they sometimes pull stuff which is not needed), you can use aptitude to easily find kde and x11 related packages by looking in the respective categories (kde and x11) under "installed packages".

Thank you both for your help. I've been able to remove most of the "desktop" stuff (X11, KDE). Some still remains. However, now I have more pressing matters which I will have to post about in a new thread. It seems that after I upgraded grub and the kernel it no longer sees the raid1 arrays and cannot completely boot. More on this later... I can't post much info right now as I miraculously got it working by switching a cable so now it is booting off of a different drive. I really don't understand what it going on, but we will figure this out later.

Thanks again.