[gentoo-user] remove gnome/systemd

[Raffaele Belardi]

After several months of Gnome3 I decided it is too heavy for my old
workstation and would like to go back to LXDE. The flow could be:

1. rebuild kernel with openRC support and install
2. emerge -C gnome networkmanager
3. emerge -C systemd
4. change profile to generic desktop (non-Gnome)
5. emerge -N lxde-meta
6. emerge -N xdm openrc anacron sysklogd sysvinit
7. reboot

I doubt it will be this easy... anything I'm missing, suggestions?

thanks,

raffaele

[Nils Freydank]

Hi, I’d run it a bit differently:
- change profile
- force-remove gnome (emerge -aC)
- double checking USE flags and updating @world as usual
- cleanup (emerge --ask --verbose --clean)
- install services that aren’t already installed as a dep (maybe anacron or ntpd/chrony)
- Adding the services to appropriate runlevels (e.g. rc-update add xdm default)

- If necessary, replacing udev with eudev. I don’t remember if it got changed automatically
a while ago on one of my systems due the switch.

If you didn’t explicitly removed OpenRC you have it already installed, (removal is possible though),
and sysvinit gets pulled in by OpenRC ;-)

BTW, I personally like elogind (a standalone "cut off" of systemd-logind) and can suggest it
as a surrogate for consolekit2. Support by the upstream is incredible fast.

Have fun :)
Nils
> thanks,
>
> raffaele

--
GPG fingerprint: '00EF D31F 1B60 D5DB ADB8 31C1 C0EC E696 0E54 475B'
Nils Freydank

[Nikos Chantziaras]

You can just keep systemd and only remove Gnome. Switch to another,
non-Gnome systemd profile and unmerge Gnome, then do a --depclean. Also
look in your world file to see if you have anything in there that
prevents depclean from removing it.

[Heiko Baums]

Am Tue, 12 Sep 2017 17:55:22 +0200
schrieb Raffaele Belardi <raffaele...@st.com>:

> 2. emerge -C gnome networkmanager

You don't need to uninstall networkmanager except you want to uninstall
it for some other reasons. It doesn't need gnome or systemd.

> 5. emerge -N lxde-meta

I'd prefer Xfce, but that's a matter of taste. As far as I know LXDE
isn't developed any more in favor of LXQt.

> 6. emerge -N xdm openrc anacron sysklogd sysvinit

You don't need to install sysvinit explicitly. It's a dependency of
openrc.

Instead of anacron I'd suggest fcron. It has all the features of both
cron and anacron.

Instead of sysklogd I would use syslog-ng. I don't remember the reasons.

Instead of xdm you'd better try slim or lightdm. Lightdm doesn't need
systemd either, except if you want to use multiseat with it.

Then you should replace udev by eudev and put USE="-gnome -systemd"
into your USE flags in /etc/portage/make.conf.

Just to be absolutely sure put this line into
your /etc/portage/make.conf, too:
INSTALL_MASK="/lib/systemd /lib32/systemd /lib64/systemd /usr/lib/systemd /usr/lib32/systemd /usr/lib64/systemd /etc/systemd"

Heiko

[Mike Gilbert]

On Tue, Sep 12, 2017 at 5:20 PM, Heiko Baums <li...@baums-on-web.de> wrote:
> Just to be absolutely sure put this line into
> your /etc/portage/make.conf, too:
> INSTALL_MASK="/lib/systemd /lib32/systemd /lib64/systemd /usr/lib/systemd /usr/lib32/systemd /usr/lib64/systemd /etc/systemd"

I would advise against this INSTALL_MASK setting. It is quite likely
to break things (like sys-fs/udev).

Its only value is to give a warm and fuzzy feeling to people who have
an irrational hatred of systemd.

[Heiko Baums]

Am Tue, 12 Sep 2017 17:28:40 -0400
schrieb Mike Gilbert <flo...@gentoo.org>:

> I would advise against this INSTALL_MASK setting. It is quite likely
> to break things (like sys-fs/udev).

No, it's not.

I'd consider it a bug if systemd is not installed and
another package that doesn't depend on systemd relies on something that
is installed in a systemd subdirectory.

And for me nothing was broken since several years now.

And, like I said, I'm using eudev instead of udev.

Heiko

[Daniel Campbell]

You may be using eudev (and thus don't need to worry about it), but if a
person blindly copies that into their make.conf and sys-fs/udev breaks,
they'll get to keep the pieces because they deliberately screwed
themselves. It's not a use case we can support. It doesn't mean
INSTALL_MASK is always a bad idea; it's simply meant to be used by
people who are fully aware of its effects.

--
Daniel Campbell - Gentoo Developer, Trustee, Treasurer
OpenPGP Key: 0x1EA055D6 @ hkp://keys.gnupg.net
fpr: AE03 9064 AE00 053C 270C 1DE4 6F7A 9091 1EA0 55D6

[Raffaele Belardi]

On Tue, 2017-09-12 at 18:31 +0200, Nils Freydank wrote:
> Am Dienstag, 12. September 2017, 17:55:22 CEST schrieb Raffaele
> Belardi:
> > After several months of Gnome3 I decided it is too heavy for my old
> > workstation and would like to go back to LXDE. The flow could be:
> >
> > 1. rebuild kernel with openRC support and install
> > 2. emerge -C gnome networkmanager
> > 3. emerge -C systemd
> > 4. change profile to generic desktop (non-Gnome)
> > 5. emerge -N lxde-meta
> > 6. emerge -N xdm openrc anacron sysklogd sysvinit
> > 7. reboot
> >
> > I doubt it will be this easy... anything I'm missing, suggestions?
>
> Hi, I’d run it a bit differently:
> - change profile
> - force-remove gnome (emerge -aC)
> - double checking USE flags and updating @world as usual
> - cleanup (emerge --ask --verbose --clean)

Isn't cleanup better performed by emerge --depclean?

Won't emerge --depclean be confused if I change profile before running
it? I'd expect it to check the USE flags before deciding to remove a
package so if I change profile beforehand it will base decision on
wrong assumptions. But I'm not at all sure about this, does anybody
have an opinion?

> - install services that aren’t already installed as a dep (maybe
> anacron or ntpd/chrony)
> - Adding the services to appropriate runlevels (e.g. rc-update add
> xdm default)
>
> - If necessary, replacing udev with eudev. I don’t remember if it got
> changed automatically
> a while ago on one of my systems due the switch.
>
> If you didn’t explicitly removed OpenRC you have it already
> installed, (removal is possible though),
> and sysvinit gets pulled in by OpenRC ;-)
>
> BTW, I personally like elogind (a standalone "cut off" of systemd-
> logind) and can suggest it
> as a surrogate for consolekit2. Support by the upstream is incredible
> fast.

I'll check this. I confess consolekit is one of those packages that got
installed somehow but I never did any configuration or study about it
(i.e. I don't know why it's there...)

[Raffaele Belardi]

Thanks, I'm not against systemd, it's just that I'm more familiar with
OpenRC. I installed systemd only to avoid the hassle of a gnome-
without-systemd and in these few months I've had no complaints about
it.

After much reading I concluded that an init system is just that, after
startup you generally have little interaction with it so one stable
system is practically equivalent to another one.
That is, if you don't care about the technical/philosophical issues
behind one choice or the other...

raffaele

[Raffaele Belardi]

On Tue, 2017-09-12 at 23:20 +0200, Heiko Baums wrote:
> Am Tue, 12 Sep 2017 17:55:22 +0200
> schrieb Raffaele Belardi <raffaele...@st.com>:
>
> > 2. emerge -C gnome networkmanager
>
> You don't need to uninstall networkmanager except you want to
> uninstall
> it for some other reasons. It doesn't need gnome or systemd.

Right. It's only personal preferences (startup scripts are plain enough
here, no need for dynamic reconfiguration).

>
> > 5. emerge -N lxde-meta
>
> I'd prefer Xfce, but that's a matter of taste. As far as I know LXDE
> isn't developed any more in favor of LXQt.

I might give Xfce a try. I did not find any definitive resource on the
web stating that LXDE is dead. There are some recent commits on the
sourceforge repo so it looks still alive (although not kickin').

>
> > 6. emerge -N xdm openrc anacron sysklogd sysvinit
>
> You don't need to install sysvinit explicitly. It's a dependency of
> openrc.
>
> Instead of anacron I'd suggest fcron. It has all the features of both
> cron and anacron.

That was a mistake on my part, actually I was using vixie-cron. It's a
24/7 online machine.

>
> Instead of sysklogd I would use syslog-ng. I don't remember the
> reasons.

Probably I was using the same here, thanks for reminding me.

> Instead of xdm you'd better try slim or lightdm. Lightdm doesn't need
> systemd either, except if you want to use multiseat with it.

I used xdm (although it looks ugly) because I need a DM that updates
the wtmp file and lxdm was not. Do you know if slim/lightdm support it?
I did some research at the time but I forgot.

[Heiko Baums]

Am Wed, 13 Sep 2017 09:48:57 +0200
schrieb Raffaele Belardi <raffaele...@st.com>:

> I might give Xfce a try. I did not find any definitive resource on the
> web stating that LXDE is dead. There are some recent commits on the
> sourceforge repo so it looks still alive (although not kickin').

I guess I wasn't quite up to date.

That's what http://lxqt.org/about/ says:

"Historically, LXQt is the product of the merge between LXDE-Qt, an
initial Qt flavour of LXDE, and Razor-qt, a project aiming to develop a
Qt based desktop environment with similar objectives as the current
LXQt. LXQt was first supposed to become the successor of LXDE one day
but as of 09/2016 both desktop environments will keep coexisting for
the time being."

Nevertheless I like Xfce better, mainly because in my opinion it has
more and better panel add-ons and it feels slightly better. But, like I
said, it's just a matter of taste.

> Probably I was using the same here, thanks for reminding me.

You're welcome.

> I used xdm (although it looks ugly) because I need a DM that updates
> the wtmp file and lxdm was not. Do you know if slim/lightdm support
> it? I did some research at the time but I forgot.

They both do it.

With slim you need to add these two lines into your /etc/slim.conf:
sessionstart_cmd /usr/bin/sessreg -a -l $DISPLAY %user
sessionstop_cmd /usr/bin/sessreg -d -l $DISPLAY %user

But if I recall correctly this was already added by default on
Gentoo. But it's possible that I had to add them myself and just forgot
it.

I haven't tested lightdm on Gentoo, yet. But on my Raspberry Pi on
which I currently run Arch Linux (despite systemd) it does it
out-of-the-box. On Debian based Distributions there seems to be a bug.

Heiko