at some point in the past I tried installing a lot of stuff from scratch... from source. This was stuff I needed for a project I was working on, mostly boost libraries, that I no longer need. Is there a way to remove from my system everything that was installed this way, leaving all the files that the aptitude package manager installed alone?? I wouldn't mind loosing all it. I know that source binaries end up in a separate directory structure. Is that possible?

I've been following testing now for several years and I don't want to go through a clean install. Thanks for reading.

Packages installed from source are typically unstalled in /usr/local. Or if you still have the sources, you can run "make uninstall".

Also, I would be very surprised if the boost libraries aren't available for installation using your package manager. Why did you install from source?

I was trying to cross compile something that required a specific version of boost. I've been careless and not kept the sources. My fear is that the typical $PATH variable puts /usr/local/bin before other things (like /bin and /usr/bin) this means if I install the packaged version of something like boost, then I won't be using it and I won't even know it. Let's say I delete the contents of directories at /usr/local (including things in lib folders). What about the libraries and stuff. Do I have to do anything special to make sure that I'm using the right libraries after I do my deleting? I haven't done much research into how libraries are loaded or registered (are they loaded if they live at /usr/local/lib ??)

thanks.

$PATH is not for libraries.

How can they be loaded after they're deleted?

So it's not a problem then? OK.

I did this and it seemed to work out OK.