How to uninstall a program that was not installed using the package manager on Linux Mint?

Question

So, I installed Canto Atom/RSS reader using the source from the official website, but it was throwing me errors so I installed it using apt-get (this worked).

Now, I want to uninstall the original but I dont know how, as there is no make file so I cannot do make uninstall, there's only setup.py and it only has options to build or install. How do I remove it from my system?

I'm running Linux Mint 14 64-bit, btw.

Answer 1

I know this is an old question, but the solution is something I was looking for at one point in the past for ImageMagick I installed from source on Ubuntu, so I will share what I learned, from my experience.

The key: Build your own .deb package as a part of the install process using checkinstall. As the official Ubuntu checkinstall page explains:

CheckInstall keeps track of all files installed by a "make install" or equivalent, creates a Slackware, RPM, or Debian package with those files, and adds it to the installed packages database, allowing for easy package removal or distribution.

So knowing that, let’s install checkinstall like this:

sudo apt-get install build-essential checkinstall

Note I am adding build-essential to the mix to ensure your compiling environment is solid.

Now, run this command to install all of the dependencies—libraries and such—needed by Canto:

sudo apt-get build-dep canto

Once that is done, download the Canto source code of the exact version you want to remove and then build the binary from the source by running ./configure like this:

./configure

But instead of the next typical steps of make and sudo make install run this command instead:

sudo checkinstall

That will build the .deb package and install Canto again. Don’t panic! When that install is done, look at the final output and it should say something like:

You can remove it from your system anytime using:

     sudo dpkg -r canto-1.2.3

And there you go! You can remove Canto! And this works for most any source code compiled on a Debian setup such as Linux Mint.

If this can’t help the original post 6+ years later, I hope this helps someone else who comes across this!