Hi!

I'm running Xubuntu 8.04 (which uses the Xfce desktop environment). I'm wanting to install the standard GNOME desktop as an add-on, but I don't want all the extras (such as extra text editors, games, terminals, etc.). All I'm wanting is a bare-bones setup, as I am short of disk space and quite happy with my current set of applications.

So the question is, what packages must I install to get just the bare-bones GNOME desktop (including, of course, the GNOME desktop configuration utilities) for Xubuntu 8.04?

Thanks,

buginprogram

Sorry, ubuntu/xubuntu 8.04 is 'end of life, out of support'. So even if you can get Gnome 2.X installed (which wont be fun) the OS is still insecure.

You could get a new version (xubuntu 12.04 is supported until april 2015, xubuntu 13.10 july 2014) but you wont get gnome 2.X for any of the current ubuntu versions. Gnome 2.X was dropped a few years ago.

You can get mint with 'MATE', a gnome 2.X fork. Mint 13 MATE is supported up to april 2017, mint 16 MATE july 2014

Currently I'm getting the packages from old-releases.ubuntu.com. I don't care that it's out of date-the point is that it's what I find runs nicely on my older hardware.

Your system, your rules. Do yourself a favor and abstain from actions like online banking, paying with credit cards online, accessing important sites with personal data, ..., if you like to keep your money and private data.
At this point your system is already potentially compromised, since it is wide open to any script kiddie on the Internet, using attack vectors already closed on modern OSes.

Just tell me how to install GNOME!

As we have no idea how you are installing other packages the best anyone can do is tell you to use the same techneque you are using now.

Have no idea what you are trying ot do or why.

Only thing we can be sure of is that you are cranky about being told that it is stupid to be using an obsolete, out of date, no longer supported OS.

Besides being demanding of people that are not here to cater to you but to help people on our own time.

Perhaps you should tell us your address and we will just drop everything, fly in and do it for you. Do you need your dishes washed too?

I have already explained that I am getting the packages from old-releases.ubuntu.com, and I have already explained that what I am trying to do is install GNOME without installing the extra "utilities" that come with it as I am happy with my current application set.

Now all I need is to know which packages to install (never mind about how to install them) to get the basic GNOME setup without the "utilities" as described in the first post.

I have no idea what Ubuntu calls the meta package for the Gnome DE. Take a look in Synaptic. Find that package.

Go to, on the Synaptic tool bar, Settings>Preferences>General and make sure all boxes are checked except for;
Consider recommended packages as dependencies,

And the very last box.

Hit Apply.

You should now have in the lower right hand side of the Synaptic Screen a box with a number of tabs. Open the Depends tab.

The Meta package doesn't in itself have any code. All it has is an install script that installs a bunch of other packages listed as dependencies for the meta package. This makes installing large numbers of packages easy.

The Depends tab will list all packages to be installed by the Gnome DE meta package. You can pick and choose what you want from there.

Those packages will also have depends however and you will need to check them to avoid things you don't want.

Synaptic is pretty much just a gui front end for several apt functions.
where gnome is the meta package name appropriate for Ubuntu should give you the same information. Here under Debian Sid this looks like;
As you can see this may be a lot easier to use if you are using apt-get or aptitude (has its own search function) as you can copy/paste from the list.

I open a separate tab in the terminal to check the depends and re depends for the listed packages.

Gnome is a highly integrated DE and you will be pulling in a lot of extra packages that you probably don't need. This is just what comes with having more than one DE on a system.

You also have a lot of Gnome packages already installed. They come with Xubuntu. I think you will find, unless things have changed, that if you run;
you will find that it is installed. Simply to run your desktop. This actually pulls in quite a few things you don't need already so I wouldn't wory about it too much unless you have a space problem.

Xubuntu has a lot of Gnome "polution" in it that I don't appreciate at all but will actually keep down the size increase to your system when you add Gnome to a small extent.

I have already tried that approach, but I was struggling to establish exactly what each of the packages do (as the descriptions were not very helpful).

I was hoping that maybe someone who had been through this could tell me exactly how it all fits together and what packages make up the "basic" GNOME and what makes up the "extras".

That is pretty much asking folks to do your homework for you. This is really unreasonable for a couple of reasons;
A>people have their own systems to manage
B>their definition and yours as to what are extras are not going to be the same
C>as an Xfce user I think you have way too much gnome installed now and gnome users probably thing way to much Xfce is installed
D>you are on a completely obsolete system where both xfce and gnome are extremely different than they are today

All of that makes any package decissions very personal to your system and no one but you is qualified to make that sort of choice.

A better approach, besides getting an actually supported OS, would be to install as little of gnome as possible and then remove things you don't want.

A couple things have come to mind for me thinking back on when I ran Ubuntu 8.04. One is that there are 2 options for installing Gnome meta packages;
1>ubuntu-desktop
2>gnome-desktop

I think that second may not be the exact name of the package but it is close. There is a lot of extra stuff in the ubuntu-destop compared to the gnome-desktop package. This is because Ubuntu is a Gnome distro and has their ideas as to what should be included so the ubuntu-desktop gives you the full assembly of packages that Ubuntu wants on their Gnome release. The gnome-desktop is simply the packages that the Gnome project ships with Gnome with no extras.

Most of the utilities will be in either, Ubuntu may have added some, I don't remember because I used the ubuntu-desktop as shipped (looked at Xfce 4.6 and was not impressed - 4.8 is a LOT better and 4.10 better yet).

If you install the meta package there may be some conflicts with packages already installed. In these cases the existing package will probably be removed. You need to keep track of any such packages if that occures and you want to keep the package.

These can be reinstalled later by removing the new one that conflicted. As the new one is a dependency of the meta package this can't be done, as is, without removing the meta package. This sort of thing is determined by the "state" of the package. All depends packages are installed and their "state" is "automatic". Removing them is tough. Packages installed individually have a "state" of "manual" and they remove easily.

Using;
will "break" the meta package up. It changes the state of ALL packages to "manual". Two things;
1>I don't use sudo, I have a root password. Assume system commands like the aptitude command have sudo in front of them.
2>changing the state of a package can cause some problems particularly if you use it several times to change the state of later installed meta packages.

Just because you have changed the state of all packages doesn't mean that packages that are "real" depends can be removed with out removing the package that really depends on them. That keep-all command was invented so that you could install meta packages but still have control of your system. Meta packages save a LOT of typing time. When that was invented the system was also much simpler. With more complexity comes more chance of you setting up some "interesting" conditions. It is not just changing the state of the meta package you just installed. You have, for instance, the xubuntu-desktop (may not be the name of the package) which is the meta package with the Xubuntu look and feel built into it. All those packages will now be "manual" too.

I do use that command at times though and have only had trouble once due to excessive use of it. Kind of a kid with a new toy syndrome time of situation.

It should allow you to remove some utilities and applications that you don't want to keep that may otherwise be impossible to remove. Some you are probably going to have to live with as they are required by something else you do want to keep.

Aptitude and apt-get are pretty safe to use together now. In your Ubuntu version they are a bit more tricky. This would not concern me much because you are changing the state of all packages and it is the state of packages that was the main problem with mixed usage. I would stick with aptitude and drop apt-get if you use aptitude even once.

I would use the terminal to do this entire process. You get better info on what is going to happen all visible at once. READ all of it and think before letting it go ahead.

If you use aptitude it will, maybe, be of some help. It is older and designed before dependency resolution was near as good as it is today. It will give you options if there are conflicts.

There are also 2 other commands that it has that may be handy;
which will tell you why a package needs to be installed.
which tells you why a package will not be installed.

Ubuntu 8.04 was a very nice OS. I liked it too. I think you should really think about getting some Live CD/DVDs of some other OSs that have not reached their EOL. This is really not a safe thing to be using on line.

While I am not a guy that needs the latest and greatest version of packages there is such a thing as packages being a bit old. Most of what is in 8.04 fits that catagory.

I don't know what your reasons are but if the age of your hardware is the reason I really do have Wheezy running on a Dell Latitude that doesn't have built in wifi but does have a built in dial up modem and it runs fine. This should mean that Ubuntu 12.04, based on Wheezy, should run on it too. I am not going to try it but I think you should really concider it.

Some older hardware is not going to like the Plymouth (boot splash and boot log writer) used in the newer Ubuntu and other family members. Some other distros, like Debian, don't use it. Most of the problems are caused by the splash. Hitting Esc when it first starts will take you out of it and into the scrolling text which is no problem. You can remove "splash" from the instruction string in the menu entry and never see it again.

Good luck.

The problem you are having is that after an Ubuntu version reaches end of life, the repositories go offline forever. You can no longer download the packages you want for Ubuntu 8.04.
The old-releases.ubuntu.com site only has the iso images as far as I can tell. It does not have individual packages.

If you want a version of Ubuntu that will work well with older hardware, I would strongly recommend that you do a clean install of Lubuntu 13.10. No, it does not have Gnome, but if you have old hardware, you would be better off avoiding Gnome anyway.
Lubuntu is the fastest and lightest and best version of Lubuntu; and it would be the best choice for an old machine. The LXDE desktop is very good and dead simple to use.
LXDE does not have a bunch of fancy features like Gnome or KDE, but who needs those anyway, especially with an older computer!

If you were using Lubuntu 13.10 you would have a fast and light system that would be supported with security updates.

I dotn think this is a good idea.

If the OP is already using an outdated, out of support OS then lubuntu 13.10 (or any other 13.10 release for that matter) is a _bad_idea_ IMO. The 9 months support length is too short, and Lubuntu 12.04 is out of support as well...basicly Lxde from canonical is dead if you actually want a decent support length.

Well, the intention would be to upgrade to Lubuntu 14.04 when it comes out in April.
The LTS versions of Lubuntu do have the long term support, at least for the base system.

buginprogram you are approaching this question all wrong.

Put yourself in the mind-frame of a person who worked closely with the development of Ubuntu 8.04 way back in 2007-8, who is an expert, who can give you excellent answers to your questions. Is this person trolling LinuxQuestions.org looking to help users of his/her creation? Of course the answer is 'no' since 8.04 is now long-unsupported and this expert has moved on to other projects.

So you can do one of two things:

1. Go to historical sources of Ubuntu information like UbuntuForums.org and search in the date range of 8.04 support. Major search engines like Google have this feature. I just found out in 15 seconds that Ubuntu 8.04 had a metapackage called "gnome-core" and there are several ubuntuforums.org threads discussing exactly the difference between "gnome-core" vs "gnome-desktop-environment" for example. So the simple, no-stress answer to your "Just tell me how to install GNOME!" demand is simply: "sudo apt-get install gnome-core"

2. Shift the burden for this research onto the good people of LinuxQuestions, most of whom have moved on to supported releases in the years since 2008 and can't be bothered to look up some crumb of obsolete 2008 historical advice, and so instead will repeat ad-nauseum the excellent advice that you should upgrade, too.

LOL, I doubt that anyone who is trying to run 8.04 is going to want to upgrade from 13.10 to 14.04.

Yeah, the 'base' is LTS, but there is lots that isnt supported past 9 months in lubuntu 12.10+. Sure, it might be les risky than having say an out of support browswer, but its once suport is dropped for the desktop/Lxde/etc. lubuntu is still end of life, out of support. Who knows wat will happen with 14.04, but I really doubt lubuntu 14.04 it will be an LTS.

IMO its not really worth it anyway, in my experience debian xfce is 'lighter' than lubuntu, and that way the OP still has the Xfce desktop they want.