For reasons best not mentioned I need to reinstall X from scratch.

I figured that before doing this I would clean out gnome and kde (gnome started these problems so a fresh install of that would be good).


I have tried the famous:-

'whereis' gnome which gave me:-

/etc/gnome
/usr/share/gnome

then rpm -qa gnome

returned a big long list of files.


So I next (possibly lethal this but I really don't know) tried

rpm -e --allmatches --test gnome

which said "package gnome is not installed"

ok so I tried:-

rpm -e --allmatches --test gnome*

returned the same thing ...

Ok - so I search the gnome site (seemed a sensible place) and google but only found unanswered questions.

I KNOW gnome is on the system but what is the safe way to go and remove things.

I could try

rpm -qa gnome | grep gnome > gnomeFiles.txt

and then pipe this as input for rpm -e ........ with a nodeps option set but this seems to be asking for a ton of trouble.


Can gnome be removed at all ... ?

At least on my system, there is no package called "gnome". You have to remove "gnome-core" and "gnome-libs" and possibly a bunch of other stuff. Some of the packages listed by "rpm -qa | grep gnome" might be nothing to do with gnome itself but could be gnome versions of something.

Anyway, you don't really need to remove gnome and kde first. Just upgrade/reinstall XF86 with "rpm -Uvh <packages>" and then do the same with gnome and kde if you still have problems.

John