Ubuntu 64 Minimal Install Upgrades

I’ve been running Ubuntu 64 installed from the minimal install for about 4 months now, and have been slowly tweaking it to get it just how I want to be.

This mainly came about after a…not quite disastrous, but certainly a downright ugly upgrade of a 32 bit version from 10.10 which had been running quite nicely, to 11.04 with the Unity interface which did not appeal to me at all.

So I was a little nervous about performing a full ‘do-release-upgrade’ in case my lovely, clean(ish) install got stomped. Would the upgrade pull in a load of dependencies I didn’t want? Would my AwesomeWM desktop be replaced by Unity?

I hang around on the #ubuntu IRC channel on the freenode network (irc.freenode.net) and help out where I can, and asked around on there to find out what might happen. A very decisive answer from the ever-helpful ActionParsnip said I was in no danger at all. Good to know.

A few days later, the release had come out and the only people complaining seemed to be those using Unity. I took plunge and upgraded. I had some circular unmet dependencies that I sorted out by rather messy and dangerous uses of ‘apt-get install -f’ on individual dependencies until the packages installed. But this went easily enough and everything worked as expected.

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