Xubuntu to Lubuntu

Question

I am using Xubuntu and i want to change Lubuntu.I have copy the code from http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/purelubuntu and run in terminal.

The output of apt-get is listed here:

Reading package lists... Done   
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done   
Package 'gnome-games-data' is not installed, so not removed   
Package 'libsnmp15' is not installed, so not removed  
Package 'ttf-droid' is not installed, so not removed   
E: Unable to locate package firefox-gnome-support  
E: Unable to locate package ibus-pinyin-db-android  
E: Unable to locate package ibus-pinyin-db-open-phrase  
E: Unable to locate package libbrlapi0.5  
E: Couldn't find any package by regex 'libbrlapi0.5'  
E: Unable to locate package libdotconf1.0  
E: Couldn't find any package by regex 'libdotconf1.0'  
E: Unable to locate package libical0  
E: Unable to locate package libotr2

Can i remove these libraries from terminal?

Answer 1

The article you're using as a guide is very old - and was written for a version of Xubuntu from 3 years ago, which is no longer supported. Current versions of Xubuntu include a different suite of packages than that release did.

• When it says "Package 'foobar' is not installed, so not removed" - that means you never had that package in the first place, so don't worry about it.
• When it says "E: Unable to locate package foobar" or "E: Couldn't find any package by regex 'foobar'" - that probably means that exact package is not included in your version of Xubuntu. You could have a similar package with a different name, but you might not.

What you don't see is all of the packages that are included in your version of Xubuntu that you want to uninstall, but the system is not uninstalling because they are not included in that 3-year old list.

For those reasons, the simplest way to replace xubuntu with lubuntu would be to run these three commands:

sudo apt-get install lubuntu-desktop

And then, after logging out and logging in using LXDE (the Lubuntu desktop):

sudo apt-get purge xubuntu-desktop
sudo apt-get autoremove

Some miscellaneous files or packages may still remain from your Xubuntu installation. If you would like to be as thorough as that guide was, I would recommend running:

apt-cache depends xubuntu-desktop > ~/xubuntu-desktop-depends.txt
apt-cache depends lubuntu-desktop > ~/lubuntu-desktop-depends.txt

and remove anything from the first list that does not appear on the second with this command:

sudo apt-get purge package1 package2 ...

...etc, where each package to be removed is separated by one space.

using the "apt-get purge" command also removes configuration files, except those in your home directory. For more info on that, see here: What is the correct way to completely remove an application?

Answer 2

Test this:

Switch on your computer.

Press and hold the Shift key, which will bring up the Grub menu.

In the Grub menu select the line which starts with ---- Advanced options.

Select the line ending with ---- (recovery mode) something like:

Ubuntu GNU/Linux, with Linux 3.2.0-26-generic (recovery mode)

Press Enter key and your machine will begin the boot process.

Your pc should display a menu with a number of options.

Select the line will be ---- Drop to root shell prompt, press enter with this option highlighted.

In the terminal run it:

mount -o remount, rw /
mount --all
apt-get update
apt-get install --reinstall aptitude deborphan

aptitude remove '?and(?reverse-depends(gnome),?not(?reverse-depends(?exact-name(lubuntu-desktop))))'

aptitude remove '?and(?reverse-depends(xubuntu),?not(?reverse-depends(?exact-name(lubuntu-desktop))))'

apt-get install --reinstall lubuntu-desktop
apt-get dist-upgrade
deborphan
apt-get --purge remove $(deborphan)
deborphan --libdevel
apt-get --purge remove $(deborphan --libdevel)
deborphan --find-config
dpkg --purge $(deborphan --find-config)
apt-get autoremove
apt-get clean
reboot