On 7/19/2010 6:25 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:

On Mon, 19 Jul 2010 21:31:12 +0000, Jim Henderson wrote:

...

I've just been playing around with various installation options, and it seems that if you select the "minimal server selection (text mode)" desktop option, you still end up with a minimal X setup instead.

Have I done something wrong in trying to do this installation? The only changes I made from default in my testing were to remove unnecessary entries from the grub menu (I'm going to try it again now with no changes).

I've done both the "text" and "minimal X" installs, and the package lists are different, but the text mode install still ends up with a minimal X - at the very least, this seems to be misnamed, since "minimal X" isn't, and "text mode" isn't - "text mode" seems to be the true "minimal X".

To get to a true text mode system when done with the minimal server install, I ran the following:

rpm -qa | grep x11 | xargs zypper rm

That seems to have gotten me where I intended to be.

The problem is some binaries that can operate in both GUI and CLI mode, still require the x11 libraries, and the dependencies from there end up sucking in a full working x11 system complete with window manager and basic clients like xterm. For instance, ghostscript is used heavily in printing, and they don't ship separate X/No-X versions of the gs binary like some distros do. I have given up fighting it. I don't mind that the libraries are there on a real server that has room for them. My headless, GUI-less, use several other programs that need the libraries anyways for image manipulation for scanning, printing, faxing, emailing, barcode reading, pdf generation, exif data reading of uploaded images... It would be more of a problem on a little appliance where space was tight. It is a little annoying that my install media and the time to do an install are larger than they need to be. What actually bugs me more is the almost impossibility of avoiding the graphical boot loader and the graphical boot splash immediately following it. They are a few tiny files but what's all-important and death for me is, These Things Break Serial Console Usage!!!!! But they are part of the "branding" packages and the branding packages are part of the base package. It's impossible to de-select them during install, and it's only just barely possible to manually edit grub menu.lst to remove the gfxboot message file (but if you allow the bootloader dialog to run again it will keep putting that stupid message file back in even if you remove it from that field in the dialog) I always have to allow the crap to be installed, carefully do my manual grub edit from a shell just before the reboot, and then from the rebooted installed system, remove and _taboo_ the gfxboot and splashy packages and edit grub again. Edit grub means remove or comment the gfxboot message line, edit the individual kernel command lines to remove the splash=silent, and edit the files in /etc/sysconfig that are used to regenerate menu.lst during kernel or bootloader updates. -- bkw -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org