[SOLVED] Uninstalling Imagemagick

Hi, I don't use Imagemagick so in order to free a little space I uninstalled it from within the software manager. I then opened Symantic & noticed entries under Residual config which I would as a rule remove however the entries were related to printing such as cups & stuff like that (about 5 or 6 entries I think) so I panicked & reinstalled it because I obviously didn't want to suddenly find my printer had stopped working & I can of course live with having this program on the system & not using it. It's nice to find out though if I could have removed these entries & if not why.

Always grateful for any helpful replies that might assist me in understanding my Linux system a bit better.

Cheers.

It depends on which distro you are using. In Debian-based distros you can remove the package and keep the config files, or remove the package completely. Which distro are you using?

Do NOT remove that software on Mint! it is actually a lot more than it looks, it's an image manipulation software/library that a lot of your important apps depend on, a friend of mine had the same thought and it took a while to fix.

What I noticed on Debian systems is that when a package is uninstalled, dependencies which were pulled in are not installed. So if you installed program A0 and it pulled in A1, A2 and A3, only A0 is uninstalled when you apt-get remove it.

This hardly yields much reduction is space. Purging the config does not contribute more than a few kB. But you must be really tight on space wanting to remove programs. Usually a Linux installation fits in 8GB or less.

Browser caches and installation packages are real space hogs though. Installed programs are nothing compared to that.

jlinkels

Originally Posted by jlinkels What I noticed on Debian systems is that when a package is uninstalled, dependencies which were pulled in are not installed. So if you installed program A0 and it pulled in A1, A2 and A3, only A0 is uninstalled when you apt-get remove it. This hardly yields much reduction is space. Purging the config does not contribute more than a few kB. But you must be really tight on space wanting to remove programs. Usually a Linux installation fits in 8GB or less. Browser caches and installation packages are real space hogs though. Installed programs are nothing compared to that. jlinkels

apt-get autoremove

will remove any auto installed dependencies.

If you want to do this at the time of purging a package, you can use:

apt-get --autoremove purge package_name

What should normally release quite a bit of space on an apt system is:

apt-get clean

which removes, among other things, all the .deb files downloaded as part of apt's package installation/update process (these files are no longer needed).

Originally Posted by gillsman Hi, I don't use Imagemagick so in order to free a little space I uninstalled it from within the software manager. I then opened Symantic & noticed entries under Residual config which I would as a rule remove however the entries were related to printing such as cups & stuff like that (about 5 or 6 entries I think) so I panicked & reinstalled it because I obviously didn't want to suddenly find my printer had stopped working & I can of course live with having this program on the system & not using it. It's nice to find out though if I could have removed these entries & if not why. Always grateful for any helpful replies that might assist me in understanding my Linux system a bit better. Cheers.

In this case your "panicked" decision was more sensible than your cool-headed one to remove imagemagick in the first place.

Before removing a package, it is a good idea to see which other packages depend on it:

apt rdepends --installed --recurse --no-recommends imagemagick | grep "^  [[:alnum:]]" | sort | uniq

(this works on my Mint 19 system - hopefully it will also work on your 18.3 system)

Note that some packages may recommend imagemagick without expressly depending on it. Removing imagemagick could therefore impact the behaviour of these packages. To include those in the rdepends search, remove the --no-recommends flag above.

Another way to check which packages are going to be removed as a consequence of removing a specific package is to peruse the list of these which will be displayed when carrying out an apt-get purge or remove command, and then decide whether or not to continue.

Alternatively, you can call an apt-get command with the -s flag which simulates the action and tells you what would happen if you actually did it.

It surprises me that Mint's Software Manager didn't warn you that removing imagemagick would also remove other packages. When I try this on my system, a window in the Software Manager pops up entitled "Additional software has to be removed" which lists all the packages that depend on the package to be removed and which will also be removed as a result.

Ok, in answer to one of the earlier questions I have Mint 18.3 Cinnamon. Now having read all the comments I will be leaving it installed as that's much better than finding I've given myself an unnecessary headache & no I'm not that desperate for space so I'll be leaving well alone.

thanks to all those who gave their opinions.

Could it be because I removed it in the software manager rather than Synaptic, anyway no there was no warning.

Incidentally what do the orange marks next to the green tick boxes mean ?

Originally Posted by gillsman Could it be because I removed it in the software manager rather than Synaptic, anyway no there was no warning.

I've just checked it out - it does indeed show no warning and, moreover, indicates that "This is a dummy package. You can safely purge or remove it". Installing the imagemagick package is therefore only used to pull in the current version, imagemagick-6.q16, as a dependency.

So, removing the imagemagick package shouldn't have removed any other packages. I'm not sure why it did.

I'm still sticking with my decision to leave it, I see no reason to give myself problems unnecessarily, there's enough trouble about without inviting it

With reference to the orange star in Synaptic (post #10):

If you click on Help->Icon Legend in Synaptic, you will see that it means "Package is supported".

A look at the source code (rpackagestatus.cc, patched) shows that this is deemed to be true if all of the following are true:

. The package is labelled as "Ubuntu".

. The package's origin is "Ubuntu".

. The package's component is listed as main, updates/main, or restricted.

. The package is trusted.

For all intents and purposes, you can ignore this.

Originally Posted by gillsman I'm still sticking with my decision to leave it, I see no reason to give myself problems unnecessarily, there's enough trouble about without inviting it

A wise decision.

OK I was not so wise after all you see I did originally remove image magic but after reading the comments I reinstalled it thinking anything that had been removed would be put back,how wrong I was.
Since then I can no longer print. I get error messages about missing cups files (can't tell you what the errors are at the moment as I'm at work) but what I need to know, is there a command that can detect corrupt or missing system files related to printing or is there a utility of some sort or will I have to reinstall the entire operating system.
Cheers