Please help a noob use Adept - List of changes looks scary

[Mr_JMM]

Hi,

I opened Adept Installer as I wanted to remove some programs (this was as I wanted to streamline what's installed to make it easier for me to understand individual programs). I looked for packages with a cross next to them and clicked on it to remove it. This seems nice and easy but on the next screen I am confronted with about 120 applications on it all saying [package-name]"xyz" [Status]"Installed" [Requested]"Remove" [Description]....
This list includes many programs I don't want to remove, some I don't think even appeared in the previous menus. I gather I can click each one and change the "Requested" status but my question is: Should this screen appear and what have I mis-understood about the first screen of the "Add and Remove..." that has brought up all this applications with "remove"?

Hope that makes sense.

Cheers,

James

[eriefisher]

Re: Please help a noob use Adept - List of changes looks scary

Many programs "depend" on other programs in order to function. When you remove one program from the list It could break the functionality. When you remove a program that is a dependency of another it will warn you as it is doing now.

Depending on the app you are removing it may be safe to allow it to remove everything else as well but be careful.

What are you trying to remove and why?

eriefisher

[Mr_JMM]

Re: Please help a noob use Adept - List of changes looks scary

I was trying to remove some MySQL applications and a couple of games. i can't believe that applications such as Adept (one of many in the list of things to change) relies on either of those.

Am I really going to have to change all 120 (this is an under-estimate) of the requests?

[opie]

Re: Please help a noob use Adept - List of changes looks scary

Sometimes adept screws up and adds odd things. I've noticed this behavior with feisty. This is why you should always hit the preview changes button before committing to anything and make sure things seem correct.
Assuming you haven't committed to the changes and nothing is actually being done by adept, if you have a bunch of changes in the list the fastest way to back out is to hit the close button on the window to bring adept down. It will ask you if you really want to exit with incomplete changes. You can choose yes. When you reopen adept it should be clean.


It's best to remove things one at a time so you can easily glance over the dependencies that are removed. Games shouldn't be removing much other than game specific libraries.

[integr8e]

Re: Please help a noob use Adept - List of changes looks scary

DEFINITELY preview your changes in Adept before you commit them; I recently (probably about a month and a half ago) had to do a reinstall of Kubuntu because I accidentally deleted virtually my entire computer through Adept. It usually functions nicely, but be careful, it'll bite you if you're not looking :P

[Mr_JMM]

Re: Please help a noob use Adept - List of changes looks scary

Cheers. I am cautious enough to preview it first but when I saw the list of things it wanted to remove I thought best to cancel it. Seems to be ok now. Will use it with care.

[eriefisher]

Re: Please help a noob use Adept - List of changes looks scary

Do yourself a favour and install synaptic for packages instead of adept. It's more mature and stable and alot easier to use.

My opinion.

eriefisher