I have finally reached the point in my system where my hardware is all working perfectly and I have the packages / software I will be needing (hopefully). But since I did a complete install there are quite a few packages lying around which will never be needed. Only problem is that I am afraid the dependencies could cause problems for the installed and used packages. Unto this end I am planning to start with uninstalling the gnome environment ( I use KDE / Xfce day-in day-out ).

Any othere tips / suggestions as well as packages that you think never come to much use in a standard install ?

Well, I use a Slackware system without KDE/Gnome. The only WMs I have installed here are Fluxbox and Window Maker. Well, if you plan to uninstall Gnome, there are lots of programs made for gnome that you could not use anymore. Slackware already comes with GTK+ and GTK2+, and sometimes it is enough to run some gnome programs, sometimes not. I recommend you to keep GTK+ and GTK2+ libs because a good part of the programs I run need it (remember that GTK/GTK2+ also need the following packages: glib, pango, atk, cairo, jpegsrc, libpng, and tiff). If you want to keep yourself only with kde, watch for the programs made for gnome that not only needs GTK+ but also some other gnome packages. I use only half or at most 2/3 of the packages that comes in 'l' section, but as you have kde and xfce, maybe you need all of them. The 'd' series is important too...I think the best way for you to know which packages you need and which ones you don't need is doing a "manual" install...install only the base and then go installing the packages you want (e.g. x11, kde, etc.). When they complain about a dependence, find it, install using installpkg and take note of it. It is a time-taking way but I did this way and I have now only the packages I really need. Read the description of the packages, it may be useful too...

Mmm .. a few questions:

#1. Why 10.1? 10.2 has been available for well more than 1 year .. and with Slackware 11 soon to come, you might as well create ISOs of Slackware -current and install that.

#2. Why didn't you customize the packages to be installed during installation? It's not so hard.

How about just making a list of the things you're worried about?
Basically all you need to do is check the output of
ldd <app>
against which package holds which file :}


Cheers,
Tink

The problem with packages uninstallation splits in the two basic areas:

1. applications - it's relatively safe to remove them because they mostly don't provide any dependency solution to another package (except. like externally called cpio, ghostscript)
2. libraries - provide dependencies to applications and/or other libraries. In this case there should be made checks for dependencies before uninstalling them. If it's not obvious from package descriptions or you just don't know if they're required, you have to use helper tools like ldd or slackdeptrack to check for dependencies.

I have to mention there are also some rare cases when libraries are loaded dynamicaly, i.e. at runtime, and there is no reliable solution how to check for such dependencies - you would figure it out after application fails to run.