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I'm using Fedora 15 Gnome 3 spin and I've installed awesome as a window manager. I want to completely remove installed gnome, lxde and xfce but not to damage already installed applications. How can I go about doing this?

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When you say "completely remove" do you include the underling libraries, and if so are you willing to lose those applications that rely upon those libraries without being integrated into the window-managers/desktops? Because tese things are delivered in a compoentized way, they can end up being deeply entangled with things that seemed separate. Indeed that is part of what distributions manage: the complex inter-relationships between various libraries, services and applications. – dmckee Nov 27 '11 at 20:31
No I mean just libraries that is not used by my apps. – purple Nov 27 '11 at 21:58
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You can remove them through YUM. First find all the packages you want to remove. Something like this should work.

yum list installed | grep -Pi '(gnome|lxde|xfce)'

Then you can go and uninstall them.

yum remove gnome-package-name

Keep in mind that remove will also remove anything depending on it, so if you find something at the root of gnome/kde/xfce you can wipe it all out in one command.

Also keep in mind, and this is VERY important, you could remove software you use often including any settings it saves. Removing these programs is quite risky. It might be worth it to back up your home folder and re-install fresh. It could be the difference between days of hair pulling, and having a little time to relax while you re-install.

P.s. What is this awesome new manager?

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I'll try it now. No Awesome is tiled manager. – purple Nov 27 '11 at 20:48
so here is list: pastebin.com/aGGWwZML. And there is list of dependencies: pastebin.com/y45qVMmG. I need to use chrome, firefox, psi, pidgin, skype, transmission, remmina, netbeans, geany, truecrypt, virtualbox, vlc, totem, rhythmbox, libreoffice and gimp. So what packages can I delete safely without damage to those packages which I'm using? Also I can use alternatives for rhythmbox, vlc and totem but another packages are too important for me. – purple Nov 27 '11 at 20:57
See last paragraph of my answer. There I have mentioned how you can remove only those packages which are not required by any other packages. So your other packages will be safe. – Sachin Divekar Nov 28 '11 at 14:34
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Rather than removing packages one by one, use yum groupremove "GNOME Desktop Environment". You can check available group of software by using yum grouplist command. Search for groups related to xfce and lxde and apply the same yum groupremove package_group.

But be careful because yum groupremove will remove all packages, of any type, in the named group. It will also remove any package that depends on any of these packages. So first you check for the dependencies if you need them.

However, you can instruct yum to remove only those packages which are not required by any other packages or groups by adding the groupremove_leaf_only=1 directive to the [main] section of the /etc/yum.conf configuration file. Refer Fedora 15 deployment guide.

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Thanks, and can you answer to my bottom comment? – purple Nov 27 '11 at 21:15
Your bottom comment is not in context of my answer because yum packages groups is a different concept where you are dealing with group of packages that are mentioned in the repository and not with the individual package. – Sachin Divekar Nov 28 '11 at 7:01
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