Debian – Gnome-core on Debian

debian

I installed only the base debian package and during installation I did not select any of GUI window manager, laptop, or system utilities.

So basically I'm running debian from command line, now I want to set up a GUI just for desktop. For this I tried installing gnome-core by

apt-get install gnome-core

But is shows gnome-core as a 400MB archive, is the core package so big? I don't want any programs just the basic desktop GUI and nothing else. My internet speed is slow and I can't wait for hours together for installing gnome. Is there any other way to do it?

To install only the core package for just desktop and nothing else.

Best Answer

Apt nowadays, fairly annoyingly, installs "recommended" packages by default. It presumably wants to pull a few dozens of packages. You may skip this behaviour once with the switch --no-install-recommends, or permanently by putting the following into /etc/apt/apt.conf:

APT::Install-Recommends "false";

FWIW, I'm getting roughly 252 MB of packages on my non-X installation for a no-recommendations gnome-core. You might want to find a different desktop environment to install if that is a problem (or you can get by with a window manager alone -- a choice often overlooked).

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