So, a complaint that has come up a number of times over the years is the fact that you can open up Synaptic package manager, browse through the history, find a package you installed and all of the dependencies that came with it, and… nothing. It’s just a text log, you can’t select or un-install those packages.
Now, aptitude auto-remove almost solves this problem, but there are still cases where for one reason or another, auto-remove is fudged up or something, or you just want to uninstall a few packages.
For these situations, I offer the following simple, terminal-based hack solution:
- Open Synaptic package manager, go to File>History, and browse around until you find the packages you want.
- Select the packages and copy them (or just select them and use the magic middle click buffer)
- Open up a text file, say foobar.log, and paste the list of packages into this file
- Run the following command in a terminal:
sudo aptitude remove `cat foobar.log | awk '{gsub(/\(.*\)/,"");print}' | xargs echo`This will tell aptitude to remove all of the entries that you pasted into foobar.log. Awesome!
