I’m running opensuse 11.2 with KDE. Today I got a software update notification saying that there was some gnome related packages that needed updating. I just pressed update without thinking about it too much. Then I realized that I’m not using any gnome programs so why do I need gnome-packages? Is there a way to tell if those packages are indeed unnecessary or not. And if so, how do I remove them all safely? I don’t like having gnome stuff on my computer if I can avoid it.
Thank you.
If you use Firefox or Open Office, I think you’ll have some Gnome (or at least Gtk) libraries and stuff. You can always go into Yast and try to remove any Gnome stuff that’s there. If anything depends on it, it will tell you and you can decide if you want it or not. I really wouldn’t worry about it, though; any computer with more than 256 MB of RAM (that’s a completely random number, I haven’t done any tests) or so isn’t going to be fazed, even if you have both the entire Gnome and KDE environments installed at the same time. 
Do you have any GTK based programs? Gimp? Inkskape?
I’ve seen that before, and it would be nice to be able to navigate and see which applications use that piece so as to what will be effected.
I have GIMP and OpenOffice installed. I can understand that those need GTK packages (them being GTK applications after all), but why would they need gnome specific packages such as libgnome and gnome language files?
Gnome was the default install for SuSE/openSUSE for quite a
while…and, i think YaST depends on several gnome libraries…
–
palladium
You can see what uses what in Yast
In Software Management under the search box you can specify what is searched check RPM requires. Then type one of the gnome packages that you have question about. You should see what packages requires it.
Not anymore AFAIK. Choosing Gnome will install the yast-gtk version, choosing KDE4 will install the yast-qt version.
After a clean, standard install with KDE4 as a desktop choice, you will find Gnome related packages on your system. Indeed by Mozilla apps, OpenOffice.org, GIMP. Don’t bother about it. Uninstalling will lead to conflicts, if not, some other app might reinstall them.
Interesting… I fiddled with the search for little bit and discovered for example that OpenOffice requires libgnome. So I better not remove any packages that I think are useless, since the package management obviously knows what it’s doing.
Wise decision. See, you’re learning fast. Knowledge just kind of rubs off on you around this place. 