Moss,
Unlike the Windows environment, where system DLL's get overwritten
by application installs, not running an application on Linux is equivalent
to not being impacted by the application. However, the question of
uninstalls is interesting enough to reply to your question and also copy
the list on this reply.
Essentially, an easy unistall exists only if you have installed
using a package manager. For example, if you installed using 'rpm', an
'rpm -e' will take care of uninstall. If you are using Debian, the command
would be 'dpkg -r'. I'm not sure what the options are with the other
package managers.
Things get trickier when you install from source (or even binaries
which have not been packaged up). Most alpha / beta software comes like
this. Some applications have a well thought out install procedure, and by
default will install to /usr/local. This means that when it comes to
uninstalling, you just need to restrict yourself to deleting files in this
directory.
The best way of installing (if you think you might need to
uninstall) IMHO, would be to create a directory called '/usr/local/<app
name>' and install in that. If you are installing an appication that uses
autoconf, this means that the first step in your install would be to run a
script called 'configure' (some applications have a script called BUILD
which in turn runs 'configure'). If you do './configure --help' you should
see a list of options that can be passed to it, and the install directory
would be one of the options.
This means that when your install is complete. The last stage of
your install would be to include the '/usr/local/<app name>' directory in
the path of whatever id starts up the application. If shared libraries are
being installed, you may have to run 'ldconfig' after the path has been
set.
If the install is done this way, it is really easy to get rid of
the impact of the offending application : simply remove the '/usr/local/<
app name>' directory from the PATH, and rerun ldconfig. You can, at you
leisure, then 'rm -Rf /usr/local/<app name>'.
Regards,
Kenneth
On Sat, 14 Aug 1999, moss wrote:
>
>
> On Fri, 13 Aug 1999, Kenneth Stephen wrote:
>
> > Moss,
> >
> > Its too bad you reformatted your disks before asking this
> > question. There might have been some clues to this event in your logs.
> >
> > I would say that the number one cause of such lockups would be
> > running beta or alpha level software. Were you running anything at the
> > bleeding edge?
> >
> > Regards,
> > Kenneth
>
> i didn't think so at the time... but i later came to realize that i was
> running wm .60, which _is_ beta / bleeding edge... i thought it was a
> stable release at the time i got it (and at the time i installed it again
> after formatting), cause of the way ftp.windowmaker.org is set up...
> that's the only app i seem to have been running that was as such
>
> which is why i'm now in kde, and not wm... i tried to del as much of wm as
> i could, but since i compiled it / installed it, i'm not sure it's
> completely vanished,, not that i'm going to bother with it again, but is
> there a way to ensure (i) have an app fully taken out ?... obviously this
> is a peripheral issue (no pun intended)
>
> -- moss
>
>
