accidental inclusion of kubuntu packages

[Eric Dunbar]

On Tue, 22 Feb 2005 03:46:03 -0500, volvoguy <volvoguy@> wrote:> 
> Thanks Eric. If I have to remove all those manually, I'll definitely
> have learned my lesson. (never casually use wildcards when installing
> software).
> 
> It's been kinda fun poking through the KDE apps, but the system
> definitely doesn't like having all those packages installed at once
> (including an "ubuntu-live" package that isn't really meant for an
> installed system).
> 
> Luckily, if all else fails, I have all my data on separate physical
> drives and the only additional software I installed was "howl" and
> "mdnsresponder" to share my mp3's to itunes.  If it comes to removing
> hundreds of packages by hand, it'll probably be easier to just
> reinstall - and that will give me another excuse to test Array 5. :o)

You wouldn't have to *type* all those packages! What you could do instead is to:

sudo apt-get remove

and copy and paste a bunch of packages to the command line. You'd want
to make sure that you had ONLY spaces between different package names,
NO carriage returns. Also, I'm not sure how long the "command" can be
(i.e. how many characters can be passed on one command line).

An alternate solution would be to make a file with the package names
and pass the file to apt-get as an argument after remove. Obviously,
you'd have to make sure there are no carriage returns in that file
(search & replace /n in gedit).

I discovered that this was possible using xarg (from
<http://www.shiner.info/?manuals/ANS-from-3-to-4.htm>). This page
explains how to upgrade a YellowDogLinux install (FC-based PPC-only
distro) in place, but the example of xarg may show you how to use it
for your purposes (FYI rpm is just like apt & dpkg).

Eric.
-------------------------
>From the web page <http://www.shiner.info/?manuals/ANS-from-3-to-4.htm>:

Look what glibc rpms you have installed

[root at shiner]rpm -qa | grep ^glibc
glibc-2.3.1-51a
glibc-kernheaders-2.4-8.24
glibc-common-2.3.1-51a
glibc-devel-2.3.1-51a

As we dont need the kernheaders to be removed, the command will be:

[root at shiner]rpm -qa|grep ^glibc|grep -v kernheaders|xargs rpm
--justdb --nodeps -ev

DONT LEAVE OUT THE --justdb !!! Your system will DIE !!!

xargs is used to pass the output from the other statements to the rpm command
The --justdb tells rpm to NOT actually remove the files, only adjust
the rpmdatabase
The --nodeps is neccesary because of many other RPMS depend on glibc
the -ev command tells rpm to erase the glibc RPM and be verbose