Unistalling software in Linux
 

I would like to uninstall Doom 3 from my computer. I installed it more-or-less to see how well my system would run using the Linux NVIDIA drivers. (It runs fine, by the way.) Anyway, the program installed itself with a script and of course, cannot be removed with YaST, since YaST did not install it.

After some investigation, I discovered a program included in SUSE's distribution called CheckInstall. Unfortunately, it only seems to work to help install and uninstall packages from source, not with programs that use a proprietary installer.

I searched the web and these forums, and all I found for removing programs were suggestions like, "Well, it takes a lot of work. You have to find all the files manually and delete them." Although this may be true, it is hardly helpful, since there are many files in any computer these days and locating them all would be a weeklong task, if they all indeed could be located manually.

Therefore, my question is this: is there some reasonably efficient procedure for determining where a program put all of its files so they can be removed? Is there some utility that can help this? I would rather do the job right. If that is not possible, I will just leave the game where it is. Its only fault is that it is taking up hard drive space and there is almost a zero chance that I would ever want to use it again. Any helpful suggestions will be appreciated.

If you installed from an rpm package, it's as easy as 'rpm -e <packagename>'. Debian probably has something similar with their package format.

If you installed from source, or if you want to in the future, look in the package for an uninstall script. It it isn't there and you install anyway, the only way to remove is to chase down the files one by one. It might be helpful to print a list of the contents in the tarball before installing, and save the list. That'll tell you most of the files to remove. It just won't tell you the names of files created during compile.

There are alternatives with tarballs. Checkinstall can go through the install steps for you and create an rpm to install. That brings you back to 'rpm -e' above.

Stow and encap can install tarballs in /usr/local/stow or /usr/local/encap, then symlink to the normal installation locatiions. They can also do what tarballs can't otherwise do: upgrade a tarball installation instead of making a parallel installation. To remove a tarball installed this way, just delete the directory it installed into, and chase down the dangling symlinks. If I remember correctly, there is a utility called symlinks that can chase them down for you. There may be others.