Removing software: How to clean up
 

Hello everyone.

As I recently installed a new copy of Slack 9 on my home box, I started to upgrade a few pieces of software. Specifically, mozilla.

After I upgraded, I started to think about cleaning up old software. Since the default install came with 1.3 and I upgraded to 1.4, I started to question how I could clean up the old mozilla.

So my question is, what are good ways to clean up and remove old pieces of software? For example, in my case, what would be a good way to remove the old mozilla and just have the new mozilla?

As I continue to work more and more with Linux, I like to keep my machines nice and tidy with no junk floating around. Thus, i'd like to find out the best way to remove old software and make sure nothing is leftover from that piece of software.

Can anyone explain to me or point me in the direction of a link I can read up on?

Thanks.

Tarballed

I use rpm to maintain my packages but I often install from source. Several months ago I cleaned out all of the obsolete source using checkinstall. checkinstall is a way to switch a source package to a rpm, Debian, or Slackware package format.

http://asic-linux.com.mx/~izto/checkinstall/index.php

The install process now becomes:
./configure
make
checkinstall

To get rid of the deadwood I installed them again using checkinstall. Then I uninstalled the rpm and they were gone.

I then reinstalled all of my current source packages using checkinstall and have used checkinstall consistently since then. Every package on my machine is now a rpm package where I used to have a mixture of rpm and source packages.

I do not know how the Slackware package system works but there is a good chance that you could do the same thing with checkinstall on Slackware as I have done with SuSE rpms.

perhaps what you are looking for is "removepkg"...

http://www.routerlinux.com/docs/manu...movepkg.8.html

http://www.slackware.com/config/packages.php

Thanks guys for your input. I do appreciate it.

Although im running Slackware on my desktop and RH on my servers (for now at least), I wanted to find a very efficient way to remove out of date packages sort a speak.

I know that RPM's can be a very easy way to remove software as long as you dont run into a dependcy problem. :)

Anyway, for now at least, I want to make sure I know how to remove software that I compiled from source as well as make sure nothing is left over from the old stuff.

I've used the slack package management system and it is very nice.

But if anyone has further suggestions on how to go about removing old software and all the gunk along with it, I would greatly appreciate it as well.

Tarballed

P.S. im reading up on the links right now :)

Slackware doesnt come with rpms.

But say you wanted to remove the old mozilla just do the 'removepkg file' I dont think that takes care of empty directories, but should get all files out. If you installed from source using make install, then a make uninstall should remove it. Again, i dont think taht removes empty directories either. Some programs dont have a make uninstall so then you have to manually find the binaries and libraries.

Also make sure to get all the hidden directories in ~/. Sometimes you can leave and the settings will carry over into the next version but i like to just remove it all before installing next version. Reason is something may have changed and the hidden config files may cause issues.