Installing Xorg without Gnome

Solution 1:

The problem here is the dependencies, package suggestions and recommendations.

At first - there is no binary xorg-server package in the repositories, this is the name of source code package, so there are binary packages which were built from it.

So you have to install one of them with

sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-core --no-install-recommends --no-install-suggests

To install Openbox with minimal dependencies use:

sudo apt-get install openbox --no-install-recommends --no-install-suggests

For correct Xorg initialisation you have to install xinit package by:

sudo apt-get install xinit

Finally you need to install the login manager like Slim with:

sudo apt-get install slim

And then reboot or launch slim manually by sudo service slim start.

Notes:

1. The resulting system installed from mini.iso will contain about 500 packages.
2. If you want to have easy way and do not really care about 50 extra packages - use simple one command to install all the stuff - sudo apt-get install xinit openbox slim .