Ken Heard wrote:
> the bloat however comes from installation of a DE; I deliberately did
> not install any of the DEs favoured by Debian.  Consequently I had to
> install the x-window-system before installing the DE of my choice.

Installing X is not necessary. You can sftp to edit sources (tee -a
/etc/apt/sources.list <<EOF...EOF is easier than manually editing) and
add the key, aptitude install tdebase-trinity will do the rest.