I have installed two packages (xrdp and ubuntu-desktop) on my server release and it cause isntallation of numerous packages by dependencies, including even sphinx speech recognition. If I would know these two packages are so heavy, I would not install them.
What can I do now?
How to revert all installations done last hour? Is it possible?
Assuming neither xrdp nor ubuntu-desktop was actually installed before, you can remove them and all the packages that were automatically installed to satisfy their dependencies:
sudo apt-get purge xrdp ubuntu-desktop
sudo apt-get --purge autoremove
Or in one step:
sudo apt-get --purge autoremove xrdp ubuntu-desktop
Here's an example of what that looks like.
This does not select by date and time, but I suspect that's not really necessary (or helpful) toward solving this particular problem. The packages you don't want were installed because they were needed for xrdp and ubuntu-desktop. (Probably mostly for ubuntu-desktop, which is a metapackage whose purpose is to cause lots of stuff to be installed.)
So removing them and autoremoving their automatically installed dependencies is probably the most correct and elegant solution.
(Just running sudo apt-get purge on the two manually installed packages would not automatically cause the dependencies to be removed. The only difference between the remove and purge actions is that purge deletes systemwide configuration files of the packages it removes.)
You can use
sudo apt-get purge xrdp ubuntu-desktop
Which will remove those packages and all the dependencies that they installed, though be careful with purging ubuntu-desktop, not sure why you would want to do that...
X11 remained installed. It is server, no need to have X11
– Dims
Oct 03 '14 at 20:19
purge action does not also uninstall dependencies (though they will be purged too if sudo apt-get --purge autoremove is run afterwards.)
– Eliah Kagan
Oct 03 '14 at 20:43