How best to clean out ELive (suggestions?) please.

I just wanted to get rid of samba, et al. That leads to thunar, to which elive appears joined at the hip. WTF for? Any user ought to be able to say, "I don't work the way that app works, so it should go", without breaking their system.

This's just userspace apps I'm talking about. Sucks to be me.

[keeling ~]$ aptitude -s remove samba-common smbclient smbfs smb-browser thunar
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Reading extended state information
Initializing package states... Done
The following packages are BROKEN:
amsn-data elive-skel emodule-launchers thunar-archive-plugin
thunar-audio-conversor thunar-ewallset thunar-image-resizer
thunar-media-tags-plugin thunar-nds-thumbnails thunar-thumbnailers
thunar-video-thumbnails thunar-volman thunar-xcf-thumbnails
The following packages will be REMOVED:
samba-common smb-browser smbclient smbfs thunar
0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 5 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B of archives. After unpacking 33.3MB will be freed.
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
thunar-video-thumbnails: Depends: thunar but it is not installable
thunar-volman: Depends: thunar (>= 0.5.0rc2-1) but it is not installable
thunar-archive-plugin: Depends: thunar (>= 0.5.0rc2-1) but it is not installable
thunar-ewallset: Depends: thunar but it is not installable
amsn-data: Depends: thunar but it is not installable
thunar-media-tags-plugin: Depends: thunar (>= 0.3.2beta2-1) but it is not installable
elive-skel: Depends: thunar but it is not installable
thunar-audio-conversor: Depends: thunar but it is not installable
thunar-image-resizer: Depends: thunar but it is not installable
thunar-xcf-thumbnails: Depends: thunar but it is not installable
thunar-thumbnailers: Depends: thunar (>= 0.5.1) but it is not installable
thunar-nds-thumbnails: Depends: thunar but it is not installable
emodule-launchers: Depends: thunar but it is not installable
The following actions will resolve these dependencies:

Remove the following packages:
amsn
e17
ecomorph-e17
elive-nurse
elive-skel
eliveinstaller-4g
emodule-alarm
emodule-bluetooth
emodule-calendar
emodule-elivenews
emodule-flame
emodule-forecasts
emodule-internet
emodule-itask-ng
emodule-keyboard
emodule-langconf
emodule-language
emodule-launchers
emodule-penguins
emodule-photo
emodule-powersaver
emodule-rain
emodule-remote
emodule-snow
emodule-startupsound
emodule-touchpad
emodule-trash
thunar-archive-plugin
thunar-audio-conversor
thunar-ewallset
thunar-image-resizer
thunar-media-tags-plugin
thunar-nds-thumbnails
thunar-thumbnailers
thunar-video-thumbnails
thunar-volman
thunar-xcf-thumbnails
upgrade-elive

Downgrade the following packages:
amsn-data [0.97.2~debian-1+5 (lenny, now) -> 0.97.2~debian-1 (stable,
stable)]

Score is 482

Accept this solution? [Y/n/q/?]

yeahp this is a problem with Debian Lenny on which Elive is based.

The Lenny repos are so old and the operating system itself touchy that any little thing and it wants to uninstall your entire system. Its not a problem confined to elive. I had the same issue when I tried using Lenny last year.

So now I've just stuck with lenny repos and say "no" to anything that wants to uninstall elive.

I was faced with a similar situation, so this is something I tried:

I booted into live mode, and left it at the most basic default settings. Added the squeeze (or whatever) repos that I wanted, and ran apt-get update.

Then installed the app (in this case it was awesome window manager 3.4.something -- hooch). I received warnings naturally that it was basically going to gut my system, and that e17 was also going to be removed. I was running in live mode, so I said Y to proceed with the install. And I was able to tinker with awesome 3.4.x WM. (I sometimes need a fallback in case I mess up my e17)

Your mileage may vary. But at least you would be able to see whether you've still got a working system or if you could identify the remains. I am going to try midori next, this way.