(solved) kde/gnome minime: what's preserved through switchover?

[denoobifyme]

I've had kde3 for about a year now. Kde4 seems to be the equivalent of Vista -- the switch is rough, the learning curve steep, and unbroken things got fixed, so people want to go back to kde3.

I'm thinking of avoiding all that by switching to gnome minime. If I do, am I installing an entirely new lifeform on my netbook?  Are my user folders preserved, or overwritten? Can I have both on my 8gig flash hdd and pick at boot with access to the same /home files? Can I keep my wallpapers or do I need to back them up and reinstall after the switch? There's nothing on here that I need to keep, I store my multimedia on an un-networked XP tower, I just don't want to have to spend all day getting Firefox and Tbird back to where they are now.

Questions summary: does gnome minime just change the desktop environment or is it an entirely separate flavor of Pclos? Does it replace kde-pclos entirely or does it just replace the kde part?

[muungwana]

you will have to be a bit more specific what you mean by "switching". If you already have kde3 installed and you just want to move to gnome, you can simply go to synaptic, install gnome, log out to log in screen and there will be an additional entry to gnome desktop and you can select it to log in using gnome.

The above procedure will give you both desktops on your system and you can log in to one or the other. You can then go back to synaptic and remove kde3 and all of its dependencies and you will end up with a gnome desktop only system. Removing kde3 will not remove anything in your home directory and all your data and settings will be preserved.

You talking about booting implies you want to dual boot btw pclinuxos-kde and pclinuxos-gnome. Why would you want to do this? you will end up with a lot duplicate system files that can be shared with the above method. If you do want that, then you can share the same home directory but it could be tricky with permissions. Since kde and gnome store their settings in different places, i dont see how they could interfere with one another

[denoobifyme]

Thanks for the reply, muungwana. Specifically, I was asking about regular pclos and minime.  Since pclos minime is not available and won't be, and since kde4 sounds like too much, grief, I was gonna switch to minime, which is only available in gnome.

I was imprecise in my post. I was thinking about the amount of distinction between pclos and minime and asked about the amount of distinction between kde and gnome.

Dual-booting -- I don't see why I'd want to either.  (smile) I was asking if I would have to. If I want both minime and regular pclos, it sounds like I'd have to. So the solution is to stop wanting to run both and pick one. If I pick minime, will it oblige me to start fresh with my Firefox and Thunderbird setup?  (Just realized I could put those folders on a flash drive and import them rather than having to manually set them up again. After updating, of course. Right?)

[muungwana]

if minime iso isnt available, you can install the regular pclinuxos and remove all additional packages you dont need and you could end up with minime if you cut deep enough.

minime = base system + desktop environment

desktop environment = kde or gnome or xfce or enlightenment etc ..

regular pclinuxos = minime + additional packages

with the above 3 formulars, you can see that you can freely move from one pclinuxos derivative to another simply by adding or removing packages since they all build up from the same base system

If I pick minime, will it oblige me to start fresh with my Firefox and Thunderbird setup?  (Just realized I could put those folders on a flash drive and import them rather than having to manually set them up again. After updating, of course. Right?)

you dont have to reinstall if you already have a variant of pclinuxos already installed. You can just add/remove package to transform it from one variant to another..you dont have to reinstall and you dont have to move anything around.

If you want to reinstall, you can tell the installer to reuse your existing home directory if you have it in a separate partition and the new system will use your existing profiles and you wont have to move anything first. If your home directory is shared with your root partition, then you will have to move your data some place else, install and move them back

[Hootiegibbon]

denoobifyme,

There are a lot of opinions of KDE4, but thats all they are - opinions, if you are thinking of switching desktop you do not have to force a reinstall. There are several Desktop Environments available and you cn install any of them and try them out without issue.

To install carry out a synaptic search got 'task-' this willl present you with some meta packages - some are desktop environments, once they are installed there is an option in the 'session dropdown' for the ones installed.

The only two that cant live side-by-side is KDE3 and 4.

I suspect that whichever environment you choose there will be a 'steep' learning curve, KDE3 and Gnome  are as different in may ways as kde3 and 4 or XFCE and LXDE, so i would rule out 'leaning curve' as a reason not to go KDE4, and would suggest that if you are taking others opinions about KDE4 as gospal then try ity for yourself, and then after trying it switch to another.

For an acer one I would consider XFCE, enlightenment or LXDE as these are lighter.

Jase

  

[denoobifyme]

muungawana, that was very helpful, thank you.

Jase,
thanks for the suggestions. Right now my congenital laziness is kicking in. I think I'll just wait til kde3's obsolescence to force my hand and then go with a learning curve, since they're all steep.

[YouCanToo]

you can still find minime here http://archives.pclosusers.com/isos/2009isos/