I posted this on sourceforge too, but I figured this would be a more active place.

I recently installed CDE (common desktop environment) on my PC. I thought it would be somewhat fun to use a more retro environment, but it doesn't quite do everything I need a desktop to do.

I was able to remove the code that would start CDE on startup, but the environment is still on the PC. I went back into Xfce but now I'm having issues with my system sound. I can only conclude this has something to do with CDE as I haven't modified anything else recently.

Firstly I'd like to figure out how to uninstall the desktop and see if that fixes my problem, but if not, I'm open to all suggestions on how to fix this.

I'm running Debian should that be relevant.

Thank you so much for your time!

Did you make an image or backup of your system before you installed CDE that you can roll back to now that the experiment has not proven successful? That is always a good piece of advice when making a non-trivial change such as installing an additional desktop environment.

On the other hand, if you do want to attempt to recover the situation by uninstalling CDE, my first question would be: "How did you install it in the first place?"

1 members found this post helpful.

I did not...Maybe that would have been a good idea...

In any case, I mostly just followed the guide here: https://mike632t.wordpress.com/2015/...an-8-0-jessie/

As well as viewing the instructions provided on the sourceforge page. https://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/wiki/LinuxBuild/

I can try to be a bit more specific regarding questions on the individual steps but for the most part I did exactly what was mentioned in those guides.

Ah. Getting rid of packages that you've built from source is more difficult because if the source makefile hasn't included an uninstall option, you have to work through it and figure where it has placed all the files it has installed. For an entire desktop environment, that could be a fair task as there are more stages than just the make.

Unless someone pops in to say otherwise, my honest reaction would be to advise you to reinstall Debian.

In the future, if you're exploring like this and making fairly non-trivial changes, make a system image or backup. It can take a matter of minutes to create one, but save you hours of work if things go awry.

I figured as much... Ugh. Well in any case I can say it had been a learning experience. Not the end of the world but irritating nonetheless.

Thank you for the advice!

If this issue occurs, in Device Manager, you probably don’t see the Realtek HD Audio option under category Sound, video and game controllers, or see it but a yellow exclamation mark present. This means there is problem with device or there are driver conflicts.To fix this issue, please try the solutions below.

Solution 1 (This applies to the case where Sound, video and game controllers doesn’t show in Device Manager.):

1. In Device Manager, click Action in top menu. Then click Add legacy hardware. (If you only see ‘Help’ under this option, please click the blank place of the list pane then click ‘Action’ again. )
2. Follow the on-screen instructions to add the “Sound, video and game controllers” category and Realtek High Definition audio device.
3. After that, you may see the Realtek audio device listed in Device Manager. Then you can install the driver again. Alternatively, you can use Driver Easy to help install the driver automatically.

Ethan Stark

Ethan, when you talk about Device Manager, are you referring to the Microsoft Windows control panel applet, and by Driver Easy, do you mean the driver updater for Windows?

If so, can I point out that this is a Linux forum and that therefore your answer has no bearing on the discussion?