[HLUG] how do I uninstall

[Benjamin Weber]

Hi Gordon,

Difficulty of uninstalling and dependency breakage as you have described is one reason that always installing things as packages is a good idea.

Some programs provide a "make uninstall" target that you can run in the source directory that you built it from and it would remove the files it installed. However this doesn't apply to all. The best thing todo in future is to register the install with the RPM database either by making a package yourself or using a program such as checkinstall. If you install checkinstall you can run checkinstall rather than "make install" and checkinstall will produce you an rpm which you can install (note the rpms produced by checkinstall are not suitable for redistribution but fine for registering an install with the rpm database).

As for removing the program you have already installed, if you still have the source code you can make an rpm as described above and then remove it with rpm -e <packagename>, or the package management frontend you usually use.

Benji