[olug] geting rif of helix

[Mark A. Martin]

I have never seen this documented and it may not be true but it seems
that the RPM database is ordered chronologically according to when
packages are installed.  At least I have noticed in the past that the
packages seem to be ordered that way when I have listed them with "rpm
-qa".

But however the RPM files are ordered in the database is immaterial.  By
reading through the query section of the rpm man page, I learned that
the --last flag causes rpm to list the packages according to when they
were installed, most recent packages first.  You could use this to make
a list of packages installed on the day you installed Helix Gnome (using
grep or your favorite editor) and loop through the list to uninstall
them.  You may have to use the --nodeps flag if some packages are
removed before packages that depend on them.

Having answered this part of your question, this is not necessarily the
approach that I would suggest.  Before trying such a brute force
approach, I would thoroughly investigate whether there is an officially
sanctioned uninstall method, such as an uninstall script.  I would start
by reading through the material on the Helix Gnome site first.  If there
is nothing useful there, I would then do a google or metacrawler search
on

"helix gnome" uninstall

or

"helix gnome" remov

(Using "remov" will bring up pages with "remove" and "removing".)

If these approaches fail to yield anything useful, I would at least try
to get a list of the packages from the Helix Gnome site and use that
list to compare the list of packages that you gathered from rpm to
packages in Helix Gnome to make sure that you don't inadvertently remove
something that you'll later regret.  Also, keep a list of packages that
you uninstall in a file in case you find that you've accidentally
removed dependencies for packages that you wanted to keep and need to
reinstall some of them.

Of course, if you know exactly what day you installed Helix Gnome on and
you didn't install any other packages on that day, the extra caution
that I'm suggesting may be unnecessary.

Mark
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Mark A. Martin					Dept of Applied Mathematics
http://www.amath.washington.edu/~mmartin	University of Washington
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