software removal; what did I do wrong?

sim0n · 04-12-2003, 08:59 AM

Recently I was trying to save some disk space since installing slackware 8.1 on my laptop over a year ago. One of the things I was not using was the fluxbox window manager so I removed it with pkgtool and (maybe rather stupidly) removed its empty directories. What happened then was that many programs vanished, for example xdvi, even though they appeared not to be connected with fluxbox. Can someone shed any light on what I did wrong? Does the installation of fluxbox create some links to other programs?

Many thanks

Simon

Mara · 04-12-2003, 05:14 PM

It looks you removed not only fluxbox. Make sure if the programs are really gone...Have you tried locate/find ?

DonLuis · 04-12-2003, 10:32 PM

How did you remove it, did you use " removepkg " or did you use
" rm " ?

DonLuis · 04-12-2003, 10:42 PM

Disregard my "how did you remove it", I didn't notice you stated package tool. That said. have you tried reinstalling the bent packages?

sim0n · 04-13-2003, 03:58 AM

After using pkgtool to remove fluxbox I used rm to remove its empty directories, perhaps this was the mistake.

anyway, I reinstalled the broken packages and all is well again.

Thanks

Simon

DonLuis · 04-13-2003, 10:36 AM

In the future should you need to remove something " removepkg -preserve " would be bettter, in that the removed package(s) is/are copied to the preserved packages directory. This lets you check out your altered configuration with a safety net.