Ubuntu

deinstall bad install (of a program) from autoconfig?

Asked by Henry Peters

Hi,

I recently, in the process of trying to upgrade a certain program w/ OS Ubuntu 8.04.1 (maxima 5.13 -->maxima 5.16) via Autoconfig, which it turned out, had some problems, & wouldn't run properly. I need to know, now, how to uninstall what did get installed, so that I may try again to do a proper install (some, if not all of the problems were mostly from my rather unexperienced procedure).

I tried using 'apt-get remove maxima', & didn't really expect it to work (my suspicions seemed well founded, it didn't, the terminal "said" something like: "program not installed." However when I did a 'maxima -d' it listed a bunch of files w/pathnames (at least there is some computer trace for them, which gives me some hope).

Thanks much in advance.

Henry

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Andre Mangan (kyphi) said : 		#1

Whatever you install on your computer will get an entry in the Synaptic Package Manager. You can use filters or the search facility to look for "maxima 5.13".

Since you did have maxima 5.13 installed, you would have a number of support files installed as well. After the incomplete removal, some of these support files would still reside on your system.

I would advise against removing support files in case some of these are used by other programmes.

You can find dependencies by typing in a terminal: apt-cache depends maxima

Inevitably at least one configuration file will remain in your Home directory - this will be a hidden file that you can make visible by pressing Ctrl+h.

If you want to reinstall maxima 5.13 just type: sudo apt-get install maxima

Does that cover it?

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Henry Peters (hwpeters) said : 		#2

Hi Andre,

Thanks for reply!

No, I guess I wasn't clear enough. I want to do a fresh install of the NEWER version maxima 5.16... & NOT the earlier version (which indeed, is in the 'add/remove' & synaptic pm). I believe those earlier programs (which included wxmaxima, xmaxima, & maxima), may have cause some amount of grief when building, compiling & installing the newer version, this is why I removed them.

In short, I need to know *how* to clean out the remains of the failed installed maxima 5.16... to be able to try again at maxima 5.16 (which is not in the Ubuntu repositories). As I tried to say earlier, I can get the files & path names from the terminal ('maxima -d'), but I do not know what to do with that information. & I might add, that some of those files are locked, so presumably, what ever I do, will have to be done, at least in part, as root (?).

Thank you much for your reply. & any further assistance will be much appreciated.

Henry

Revision history for this message
Andre Mangan (kyphi) said : 		#3

The way I would tackle this is to reinstall the version available from Synaptic and then use

    "sudo apt-get remove --purge maxima

That should clear the decks for you.

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