upgrade packages, remove old?
 

I needed to upgrade some packages in Ubuntu to install a program from source. No prob, downloaded the newest versions, installed them and...one of the dependencies still linked to the old version, though the install for the updated version was a success. Sure I could change the prefix or what not, but if I could just uninstall the old version, all would be great, right? I prefer source installs because I suck with apt-get, plus, Im new and like the practice of the raw, DIY problem-solving.

Correct me if Im wrong...I have program-1.0, download source for program-2.0, install it, and now have program-1.0, AND program-2.0?

I read somewhere in this forum to do 'make uninstall' but thats only good IF its something I installed from source, but I was upgrading stuff that came with the Ubuntu install.

I hope this is enough to explain my problem. I can't tell you much more because some genius(ME) uninstalled a package from adept that totally removed everything, and I had to redo the whole damn system. However, I want to figure this out.

Thanks for the help!

Is this what you need?

ha, that makes pretty good sense. now that i see it, im not quite sure why i didnt get that...am i right about the old and new versions being installed next to each other? or does the new source install write over the old? Thanks again.

I can't honestly say I know the answer the that. That should be a no brainer for a lot of the people on this forum though. Sorry I couldn't help more.

You'll be saving yourself a LOT of trouble if you can learn how to use apt-get or (my preference) synaptic. Using these programs will remove obsolete versions of programs, so you don't get the confusion of having more than one version of a program installed. If you want to do a lot of compiling source from a tweaking perspective, I suggest that Ubuntu is not the ideal distro. Something like Slackware, Gentoo or LFS would probably suit you better.

In answer to your question, I would expect that a source-install will overwrite the old version, except in the case where the old version had different/extra files. This may often be the case for some libraries but is probably less common for end user programs. A lot of libraries tend to create symlinks to the last installed version, to avoid problems with other packages linking to outdated versions. However, a package manager should remove the old version, and then install the new version. Since every package knows which files belong to it, files don't get left-over.

Sure You can have packages in different versions :)
f.e. on my machine i have gcc in versions 4.0 and 4.1 :)
Some packages just need to be kept for compability with older software :)
In case of user software like aMule or any other user program You dont have to have older version. :)

synaptic is just a graphical front end to apt-get. APT enlists dpkg to remove any conflicting packages and subsequently install the new packages from the DEB files it downloaded to the cache directory.