Don’t panic when you uinstall Evolution and not see a lot of things on your GNOME desktop
Always have a towel with you because every time you do something funky, you might need the sense of comfort that a towel gives. Even if you’re not travelling throughout the galaxy. ;) But seriously, don’t panic! Whether you have a towel or not, you should be fine even in the middle of an empty desktop without any panels, etc.
One evening I decided to uninstall Evolution because I wanted to just use Gnus. And I wanted more space. The careless, thoughtless me uninstalled Evolution without reading the list of apps that will be uninstalled along with it. So I went on with it then I shut down my laptop. When I booted it up, and logged in already I didn’t see my familiar GNOME desktop stuff like the panels and launchers. Thank goodness that my desktop has some directories on it and I clicked it and went to /usr/bin and looked for the apps I wanted to use like the GNOME control center, a terminal, etc. Later, a co-worker showed up and told me something: you could just install ubuntu-desktop again and everything should be fine.
I only panicked for a bit so that’s a good thing and I felt a little embarrassed over it. But at least I learned something. Don’t panic! You will figure it out. I just got worried because gnome-desktop wasn’t installing because the dependency (gnome-keyring-manager) wasn’t installable for some reason or another. In any case, everything got fixed that morning so everything’s cool again. Just remember: Don’t just uninstall Evolution because it’s a dependency for the GNOME.
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4 opinions for Don’t panic when you uinstall Evolution and not see a lot of things on your GNOME desktop
dar
Jul 30, 2008 at 4:55 pm
Yup,BTDT,last year. Panicked big time&reinstalled week-old distro,figured out goof two days later.
-learned to leave well enuff alone.
Thanks,prof Clair, for the reminder!
alvlin
Jul 31, 2008 at 6:52 am
And that’s why automatic dependency resolution and meta-packages are not always the best solution. Why on earth is Evolution needed for GNOME?
James
Aug 2, 2008 at 10:55 pm
Um… automatic dependency resolution and meta-packages are fine. The issue was that it told him what was going to be uninstalled, and he didn’t read it. It’s generally a good idea to stop and do a double take if you’re only uninstalling one app and there are three rows of packages in the listing. ;-)
James
Aug 2, 2008 at 10:58 pm
Also, Evolution is hooked into for the dropdown calendar on the clock. It’s really nifty, actually. You can click on a date and see all the scheduled activities. Likewise, TODO items in Evolution also show on the dropdown.
There may be a few other places it’s used, but that’s all that comes to mind at the moment.
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