I tried to install a program. I downloaded a tar-file. I created a "download" directory in the tmp dir and downloaded the tar-file to that. I then unpacked the source files to that same directory (which I now know is not a good thing to do). I installed the files using make and make install. The problem is that it doesn't work properly and I would like to uninstall everything and try once more.
I could of course try to remove the "download" dir I created and everything in it, but during the install process files and dirs were put everywhere. How do I get rid of these?
Linux is totally new for me (used to the practical uninstall commands of Microsoft Windows).

I use RedHat.

All help appreciated!

What is the program that you installed? If your program is available through the repositories then you could possibly uninstall using yum.

yum remove program

then do a tidy install using

yum install program

You might need to set up your yum.repo first if you haven't already ...

We can come back to that ....

Thanks for your quick repl!y! (but I am afraid I didn't understand much of it)

I am such a newbie that I don't even know what a repository is or how to see if may see if my the program is available through it!

I was supposed to install asterisk server (for SIP communication). Only the man function works. I am not able to run the program at all now. I somehow managed to run it from one directory last night, but now I cant't remember where that was.


What is yum?

yum is short for 'yellow dog update manager'. Do ls /etc/yum.repo.d/ and you should have some files in there. These files list repositories which are data stores on servers where the installation files are stored. So when you issue a yum command, assuming you are online?, such as yum install xine then the update manager will find the install files for xine from the redhat sites (or elsewhere) and install it. The beauty of it is that it will also deal with any dependency issues you might have. Not all the programs you may want will be available in the repositories but alot of the stuff you will need will be. You might need to add some extra files to your yum.repo.d directory.

For the moment, let us know:
1) What program you are installing
2) What is the output of ls /etc/yum.repo.d/ command?

I wrote
ls /etc/yum.repo.d/

from root and got

ls: /etc/yum.repo.d/: No such file or directory

I am trying to install asterisk (view http://www.asterisk.org/)

Do you get anything out of this?

What distro exactly are you using?
Can you return the contents of locate yum

FYI, YUM uses a DB it updates when you run the yum cmd(s).
If the OP manually downloaded & installed from a tar file without invoking yum, yum will NOT know about it....

Many software packages that you install using "./configure && make && make install" can be uninstalled using "make uninstall" from the source directory.

With regards to using YUM, I think it is better to use the programs in the repositories rather than building from source. This saves a lot of headaches later. Also, as was pointed out above, programs installed using YUM can be removed cleanly using YUM. Unfortunately, YUM will not remove programs compiled from source.

What version of Redhat are you using?

--Ian

I use RedHat Enterprise Linux 4

And though I now have learned the hard way that rpm instals are easier to handle, I thought I had to do this sooner or later as I am going to edit the code and later compile it from code again.

Anyway I would like to be able to use yum for other downloads. What do I do to make it work?

When i run locate yum I get:
/etc/log.d/conf/logfiles/yum.conf
/etc/log.d/conf/services/yum.conf
/etc/log.d/scripts/services/yum
/usr/share/apps/ksirc/pics/emoticons/yummie.png
/usr/share/rhn/rhn_applet/rhn_applet_yum.py
/usr/share/rhn/rhn_applet/rhn_applet_yum.pyc
/usr/share/rhn/up2date_client/repoBackends/yumRepo.py
/usr/share/rhn/up2date_client/repoBackends/yumBaseRepo.pyc
/usr/share/rhn/up2date_client/repoBackends/yumBaseRepo.py
/usr/share/rhn/up2date_client/repoBackends/yumRepo.pyc
/usr/lib/ooo-1.1/share/psprint/fontmetric/Ryumin-Light.Roman.afm
/usr/lib/ooo-1.1/share/psprint/fontmetric/Ryumin-Light-83pv-RKSJ-H.afm

It looks like YUM is not installed. You can download it from Here. Make sure you get the suitable version for RHEL4.

--Ian