Removing Sound Driver Should not Remove Entire Ubuntu Graphical User Interface (GNOME)

[Ohb01]

Binary package hint: apt

According to the Comprehensive Sound Problem Solutions Guide at http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=1191847&postcount=1 ,

"Ubuntu (GNOME) users have reported that packages 'gdm' and 'ubuntu-desktop' are removed after removing the linux-sound-base packages."

In particular,

sudo apt-get --purge remove linux-sound-base alsa-base alsa-utils

then requires

sudo apt-get install gdm ubuntu-desktop

Why does removing the sound driver remove the Graphical User Interface (GUI) for the operating system? IMHO, many places that may want a guaranteed quiet system (e.g. hospital, library) would still want to have a GUI. In any event, if you need to reinstall the sound driver, you should not lose your GUI and possibly file browser (nautilus). You should also not need to reboot a few times to correct some of these issues even after reinstalling the GUI. But then, I'm just a home user, not a software engineer. Please correct me if my opinion is wrong.

In my case, I was still having problems with Login Screen control panel and sudo nautilus after doing this (see http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=5229702&postcount=11 ), though both issues seems to have corrected themselves after a few reboots.

Reinstalling other packages may also be required, e.g. one user reported having to do

sudo apt-get install gdm gnome-applets gnome-control-center gnome-panel
gnome-session gnome-terminal nautilus ubuntu-base ubuntu-desktop
ubuntu-minimal

(see http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=1259940&postcount=68 )

Users have been reporting this issue in the Forums since 2006 (see last link above), but just in case there is no official bug report on this issue, I thought that I would file this.

Thanks in advance for looking into it.

[Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and help make Ubuntu better. What you have described is not a bug with apt, as it is correctly handling the dependencies of the packages that you are trying to remove. The reason that ubuntu-desktop and GDM are removed, is because GDM depends on alsa-utils (which you are removing), and ubuntu-desktop depends on both GDM and alsa-utils.

If you wish to disable sound on your machine, a better way to do this without breaking your install would be to blacklist the module for your particular sound card.

[Ohb01 (ohb01)]

Thank you for clarifying the source of the problem. I am considering re-filing this bug against GDM and ubuntu-desktop. IMHO, they should not depend on any part of the sound system -- they are primarily graphical user interfaces, not audio user interfaces.

Your proposed solution is "... to blacklist the module for your particular sound card." Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. Even finding the relevant module requires wading through the wiki at http://www.alsa-project.org (note: Step 3 of the According to the Comprehensive Sound Problem Solutions Guide at http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=1191847&postcount=1 seems to point to an outdated URL: http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/ is not a web page with "a drop-down box" but just a directory listing).

Assuming that you know the relevant module, how do you "blacklist" it?

Again IMHO, it would be helpful to have instructions that even a relative novice like me can follow, as this seems to be a major target audience for Ubuntu.

In any event, thanks again for pointing me to the relevant packages against which this bug would be filed.