How do you uninstall in Linux?

[Felecha]

Me again.

I was looking around for text editors for my new FC4. I know how to use vi, but I sure prefer the gEdit that comes with FC4. And in Windows I have used TextPad for years and very much appreciate its features.

So I poked around and found EditPad that has a free EditPad Lite version to try. It had an installer of all things, not configure and make. I started it up from a command line since there was no launch button yet, and when it came up I said OK, cool, let's make a button. First time I ever tried doing that but it looked like it was easy to figure out. I went through the little window for Add to Panel, and when it came to giving it an icon I saw in the EditPad directory a file called editpad.xpm. Its file type looked like the type of other buttons.

When it appeared on the panel at the bottom I went to drag it over a bit since it was off on its own by an inch or so. And the mouse pointer turned into that drag-and-drop pointer and everything froze. The pointer stayed that way, no response to any keyboard or mouse activity, just stranded. In Windows I would go to Task Manager. I don't know if there is anything like that in Linux. C-A-D did nothing, no tricks that I tried workd. Finally hit the Reset button on the box. To my dismay when it rebooted to FC4 it was very VERY slow at everything. I would say it really performed at about 10% of the speed i'm used to. I did lots of stuff and it was slow at everything. And EditPad would not launch.

Well, I was happy to see that my Windows XP was normal when I tried that. I figured I would have to try to uninstall EditPad. I looked on the net for evidence that others had trouble with it. Nothing there, all clues indicate it's a perfectly good app.

I also found that the Lite version does not give syntax highlighting, which even gEdit can do.

So now - I really dont know how to uninstall it other than to Search for all its files and manually delete them. I dont mind, but is that the way to do it? There seems to be nothing like Windows' uninstall routines.

By the way, on a second reboot everything seems normal. I am relieved but a little concerned. What could have been the problem? I dunno

 

[Felecha]

At least I found System Monitor, which looks like Task Manager

 

[rmrf]

rpm -evh <package>

e = uninstall
v = verbose
h = hash (makes the output pretty)

I'm not sure what you are using EditPad for, but I like Bluefish for editing web content. I assume it would have all the necessary syntax highlighting for system files as well. I prefer vi.

 

[Nothinman]

If it was an RPM you remove it like rmrf says, but if it has it's own installer you're at the mercy of their own uninstaller if one exists.

 

[Felecha]

thanks both

I would use EditPad for Java, C, C++, scripting. I know some HTML but dont do it

I find no uninstaller. Knowing how imperfect uninstallers are in Windows, I would indeed pray for mercy

 

[drag]

If you run into a similar situation were a X app freezes up there are several things you can use.

If your on a gnome desktop you can go thru the application menu and open up gnome-system-monitor, (name of System Monitor in the menu) which is the equivelent of that task manager in Windows. You can kill things thru that.

Also if you have a xterm open or you go thru 'run command' or 'run application' dialog box in the menu you can run a command called xkill which after you run the next window you click on it will kill that application.

If X is completely frozen up you can try to switch to console.. you do this by 'ctrl-alt-F#' keycombo were F# is one of the F keys from F1 thru F7 (generally). You can log in as root or as a normal user there and get a unix shell.

Once you get the shell you can run 'top'. Top is a proccess monitoring program and usually there are to many proccesses running to fit on a screen, however if a X app freezes it will usually be running at 100% cpu utilization and it will be at the top of the list. Hit the key 'k' and it will ask you for a PID number to kill, pids are proccess identification numbers. You type in the number of the proccess you want to kill. It will prompt you for what sort of kill with the default being number 15.. this refers to a system call and means basicly to 'ask politely for program to shutdown'. You try that a couple times and if it doesn't shutdown properly you wait for a minute or so, then you try to kill it again, but this time tell it the number '9', which means to 'kill it down violently', which works 9.9 times out of ten.

Sometimes you will end up with zombie proccesses, which are just entries in the pid stuff that don't realy do anything. Why you end up with these is kinda complicated, but if they aren't using up any cpu time or any ram then they can be just ignored.

Another method from the shell is to use the kill command and the killall command. Note that killall in Linux isn't the same as Killall inside solaris.. In solaris it basicly means to 'kill everything'.

If you know the name of the application you can just go:
killall appname

and that is the same as doing a '15' kill in top, I believe. Try that a couple times and see if it shutsdown on it's own. After that you have to find the PID number of the application.
You can do that with
pidof appname

Then you use the kill command like this:
kill -9 <pid number>

It may take a few times. Just press 'up arrow' on the keyboard to have it go to the previous command you typed in.

if you don't know the name of the program you can look thru the entire listing of pid numbers and command names by going:
ps aux | less
or if you know part of the name but not exactly what it is then you can go:
ps aux | grep -i appname

The grep will select lines based on what strings they contain, the -i tells it to ignore capitalization.

After you get that then you do the kill -9 stuff.

Some programs, like Firefox or Mozilla, use lockfiles to ensure that only one instance of the program is running. If you kill -9 it it will usually leave this lock file and next time you try to run it it will find that and prompt you to setup another user thing, which sucks. You have to find the lock file and either delete it or echo " " > filename. Something like that. Usually it's stored in some file in your home directory in the preferences files/directory which are hidden in your home directory by placing a . before the name.

You can see hidden files by going 'ls -a'. and you can filter out non-hidden directories/names by going: "ls -ad .??*" using the wildcard stuff. The -a is for 'all' and the -d is for directory. If you normally do 'ls directoryname' it will show the contents of that directory.. if you go 'ls -d directoryname' it will show that paticular directory.


If X is locked up completely and your getting desprit or something goofs up so that you can realy use it or fix it easily then you can go "ctrl-alt-backspare" to kill X entirely.

Sometimes X will screw up in a fasion that makes the monitor unusable and garbled or frozen. On a PC if you can hit the 'caps lock' or 'num lock' button and get the lights on your keyboard to turn on and off this means that the OS is still responsive on some level and hasn't locked up completely. This is because those caps lock lights require a signal from the computer to turn on and off, this avoids the problems with the lights not matching what is realy going on. (on some other computers, like Mac laptops, the caps/numlock/etc buttons are still just switches irregardless of what the OS thinks is going on.)

If the computer is still alive, but you can just tell what is going on you can try switching to console and then hitting the 'ctrl-alt-delete' key to make it reboot dos-style. You just go
ctrl-alt-F1 and then ctrl-alt-del and see if that gets the computer to reboot. Try that a few times. Wait a while it may take a bit for it to reboot.

If you have another computer you can also try ssh'ng into the computer and then issuing a reboot or shutdown -h now command as root. Sometimes root logins are disabled so you can switch to root with the su - command. If the computer is unresponsive still try as root since as a root user your priority with the system scedualer will be higher then your normal user.

If then you can't login thru ssh, or the computer is locked up then there is nothing you can do.. it's fubar'd and should be rebooted manually.

 

[kamper]

Were you running as root when you installed the program? (In the future make sure never to do that with someone else's installer). If you weren't, then you can be sure that there are no files outside your home directory and it should be pretty easy to trace everything down.

 

[Felecha]

Yes I was root. In the early days of exploring Linux I just found it easier to remain as root rather than always doing su or sudo. But I understand what youre saying. Good lesson.

I found the installer put stuff into /usr/*** (I cant remember since I'm not home now) this and that. So installing as a regular user would not let it do that? All install files would remain somewhere in Home?

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: Felecha
Yes I was root. In the early days of exploring Linux I just found it easier to remain as root rather than always doing su or sudo. But I understand what youre saying. Good lesson.

I found the installer put stuff into /usr/*** (I cant remember since I'm not home now) this and that. So installing as a regular user would not let it do that? All install files would remain somewhere in Home?

Usually most installers suck and would just fail out if you weren't root.

Smarter installers will prompt you a place in your /home directory and even smarter ones now will add a entry to your menu automaticly.. since menus have been standardized.

Usually they install into /usr/local/ directory. But decent installers will let you choose the destination. To uninstall them you generally just delete the files if no uninstaller is present.

There are some tools like installwatch that will pay attention to files accessed and you can keep a log of files that have been read from, modified, and created for future reference.

 

[The Linuxator]

I haven't read all of the posts, so I am not sure if someone suggested this yet but here comes :
Never play with packages removal just like that, it's like removing a program in Windows, from C:\ProgramFiles and not bothering with editing the corresponding Registry values.

For example if you have xmms.rpm installed and lets say it has some plugins installed with it (i.e mp3, aac...etc)

type as root :

yum remove xmms
that will remove xmms and all it's dependencies (xmms-aac.rpm, xmms-mp3.rpm...etc giving you a clean uninstall 😉

Also it will do things right, like removing it from all menus and so on.

Remember my post in your thread about kbrate ? I hope you did what I advised you to do, and installed the yumex (the GUI of yum), in yumex you can go to the uninstall section and do things from there easily, but somepackages might have been installed through FC4 itself, in that case you will need to go to SystemSettings---> Add / Remove Applications and do it from there (you might need your FC4 CD) 😉