I did a clean install of CentOS5 with the GNOME desktop on a test machine. I then decided that I don't need OpenOffice and Games. So I go into add/remove packages and remove OpenOffice and Games. Yum does its thing and uninstalls them. I reboot the computer, log in normally at the GUI login screen, and just as I feared as I have in the past with RPM installations/uninstalls, I am then presented with a very minimal gray/blueish X server with a Xterm open.

How do I get the GNOME desktop back? I suspect that YUM must have removed the dependencies, or uninstalled some dependencies when I removed OpenOffice and the Games section. Worse comes to worst, I will just reinstall, but what a pain!

I am really scared of using Yum because I have had it hose my computer in my past experiences with Fedora Core 6 and CentOS4. Not sure how you guys take the risk

You should be able to run yum from your xterm there:
Replace 'openoffice' and 'games' with the actual packages you removed - you might need to use 'yum search <part-of-package-name>' to find the exact names or to prompt your memory.

Yum does have some strange dependencies sometimes which results in things exactly like this. When I say strange, I mean they make sense looking at the packages themselves from a computer's Point of View, but looking at it from a human POV they're not quite right sometimes...

But does this mean it will reinstall OpenOffice and Games? I just wanted to uninstall those and keep everything else in tact. I remember when I removed those packages, it listed a long list of other packages. I can't recall all of them. Maybe I will just reinstall CentOS with a bare minimum.

I suppose in the future, maybe it's best to install all applications using the source? This way I would have full control of where I install programs. I have only installed Firefox and Java from source. Unfortunately I always seem to run into dependency problems when I try install other applications, but that's another story.

Yes, it will reinstall Office and Games, but it will get things working again, and then you can have another go at removing them and ignoring dependencies

The bugger got me too. I did:

• yum -y groupinstall gnome-desktop
• Click-hold desktop, exit
• On logon screen, click session and choose GNOME
• Log on