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I'm an elder non-techie Mac-to-Linux convert trying to play the linux tech game by ear, so please be gentle! :)

I am running XFCE Ubuntu 12.04 totally on a 8-gig flash drive and it's fantastic. I am starting to run into potential space issues (down to 1.0 gig free from 1.9 gigs since being installed last summer), most likely because of growing Thunderbird mail files, and this prompted my question. I just installed lightDM on my system because I want the ability to switch users in XFCE if I follow instructions on another blog. They advised using LightDM instead of GDM because LightDM doesn't download Gnome libraries. That's great since I need the space, but my question is how can I tell whether I don't already have Gnome libraries installed from other updates and such? And can I minimize having any Gnome libraries? The method for me to switch users entails creating a "fast-user-switch" file in /usr/local/bin; is there any easier way? One last thing so I din't have topen another needless thread; while experimenting I somehow lost the share folder in one of my accounts. Is there any way to get a share folder back?

Thanks for any tips!

Jim in NYC

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  • On AskUbuntu the convention is to ask one question per, well, Question. Please consider removing the 'share'-related question and posting it separately. This will improve chances for people to answer your questions.
    – landroni
    Jan 19, 2014 at 9:15

1 Answer 1

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Regarding your gdm question, you can try the following. Make sure that you do have the lightdm installed (!), then:

sudo apt-get remove gdm
sudo apt-get autoremove

The second command will check which packages where previously installed automatically as dependencies, and are no longer needed given all the uninstalled packages.

For a more radical approach, you can remove all libgnome-related libraries. But be extra-careful, as this has the potential to remove a lot of apps that you may need. So check each proposed removal carefully:

sudo apt-get remove libgnome*

Lastly, I would suspect that your space issues are caused by updated kernels (aqt least this is what happens on my machine!). Check in Synaptic if you have several linux-image-* and linux-headers-* packages installed, and remove some of the older packages. (Always keep one or two extra kernels as fallback for when things don't work with the most recent kernel.)

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