[Solved] Whatever happened to desktop-installer?

[debbiethekiwi]

Or was it DesktopInstaller, or... In my dotage I can't remember the precise spelling, so packages.debian.org can't tell me anything. It was in the repos, a perl script of about 70k, found its home in /usr/sbin. Its purpose is to install xorg and the login manager, and desktop environment chosen from 13 offered, following a cli install. It gives plenty of options, resolves dependencies, and has a default [no] for Firefox, Thunderbird and LibreOffice. It's a console app, so might not be popular for noobs, it was written in 2009, and updated several times since, looks like it should have been the backend to the netinstall CD. I used it 15 months ago on Buster 10.1, but now all the popular search engines are denying any knowledge of it.

[mm3100]

Maybe something like tasksel?
https://packages.debian.org/buster/tasksel
https://wiki.debian.org/tasksel

[debbiethekiwi]

Maybe not tasksel, because it just dumps a heap of bloatware the maintainers think might be handy. The thing I'm trying to find again took you you thru sensible choices of browser, email, text editor, appropriate to the chosen DE. Even allowing, "No thanks, I'll find my own later"

[CwF]

Uncheck all in the installer and get to the command line. apt in xorg and aptitude, then startx into an xterm, fix the resolution and fonts, fire up aptitude,..........reboot into a lean desktop!

[Head_on_a_Stick]

apt in xorg [...] reboot into a lean desktop!

Have you seen what the xorg metapackage pulls in? The OP refers to useful desktop applications as "bloatware" so I very much doubt they would be impressed with a whole slew of DDX drivers for graphics cards that they don't use.

[CwF]

Sure. It helps me to pick a full meta package, then take it apart - rather than piece together knowingly in a single step.

I have lately used a recent installer to answer a few questions on the upgrade path. Packages are thicker than they were when I last installed, and the installer much nicer! I didn't have a problem piecing together an 800 package xfce. I did see the 1250+ default result, deleted that...The exercise did fix my existing upgraded to bullseye images, since the fresh install came up with broken networking, the fix worked for all. Fresh not better...

But yes, what better way to do it? And xorg isn't that big, and still works, and for me, required.

[Head_on_a_Stick]

what better way to do it?

It is possible to install the desired components explicitly rather than just accept the cover-all defaults, for example:

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# apt install xorg xserver-xorg-{video-amdgpu,input-libinput}

^ That specifies an xorg-driver-video option, which will be installed instead of the xserver-xorg-video-all metapackage, and an xorg-driver-input option, which will be installed instead of the xserver-xorg-input-all metapackage.

[debbiethekiwi]

It is possible to install the desired components explicitly rather than just accept the cover-all defaults,

Which is just what this dandy little script did. Perl is not one of my languages, and at a glance I assumed it was making some intelligent choices about what my hardware required to satisfy the choices I gave it. I used it a couple of times when I was messing about trying to find a distro that was stable and comfortable to replace MacOS. I got it from the repos:

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sudo apt-get install [insert whatever its name was]

Then for some unknown reason I settled on mate desktop and just took the default, so now when I want it again its not even in my backups. I've tried the package search functions for "desktop", "Desktop", "desktop*", &c. even the major search engines are pleading ignorance. If it's been dropped I would have expected to see a stub saying "This has gone because..." I'm sure I wasn't smoking anything back when I last saw it...

[CwF]

Still, the fastest way is aptitude with a dselect cheat sheet. I did the above in parallel, one allowed defaulted selections and the 800 package from the cheat sheet. 792 actually, and much faster.

[Head_on_a_Stick]

https://packages.debian.org/buster/desktop-profiles?

[debbiethekiwi]

https://packages.debian.org/buster/desktop-profiles?

That seems to be a way for sysadmins to maintain consistent user profiles across different desktop environments in a multiuser situation.

I'm sure I wasn't smoking anything back when I last saw it...

No, just senile dementia. No, it wasn't a perl script, it is a bash script, and no, it was never in the Debian repos, but yes, I was booted into Debian, building a Freebsd install in Virtualbox But this script works so well, it looks just like it belongs in Debian... Sorry for the distraction