On Thursday 15 June 2006 10:59 am, Russ Edwards wrote:
I am sorry I am new to linux and am probably going to ask some pretty basic questions. How can I remove programs?? Is there an uninstall?? The specific cases are covered by Sunny and Ralph. In the general case: There is no "registry" in Linux, so to get rid of a program, you can just delete it, but... In Linux, most applications are installed using a package manager, such as RPM. By removing the RPM, the package manager will generally remove all the components, and tell you about dependencies.
There are some other good ways to install programs. before we started to use
the package managers (RPM and Debian's DPKG). The package managers maintain
a database and keep track of revisions so you can do a sane update of your
system.
Another common way to install programs without using the package manager is
with what we call tarballs. These packages are packaged up by the Linux tar
(Tape Archiver going back to early Unix) utility. These are normally
<name>.tar.gz. The usual way to build these is to unpack the tar archive
somewhere, then cd to that directory, execute the configure script
included, then run the make utility, then, as root "make install" to move
the components to their proper place (normally /usr/local):
Executables normally go (by convention) to the bin directory
(/usr/local/bin) with libraries in the lib directory
(normally /usr/local/bin). Some of these contain an uninstall, but simply
removing the executable and libraries is also sufficient. The libraries are
normally shared objects (.so) and are similar to the Windows .dlm files.
--
Jerry Feldman