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My virt-manager recently started refusing to open a VM that had worked perfectly before. I couldn’t find the reason or the solution to that, so I thought I would really, completely and totally uninstall virt-manager and then do a really, completely and totally new install. I used ALL the terminal commands I could find: autoremove, remove, --purge, autoclean, clean &c on virt-manager, qemu and kvm. I manually even deleted some relevant files I could find and razed the Trash folder to the ground.

I also had problems with Wine and went through the same steps with autoremove &c.

However…

When I “re-installed” virt-manager, qemu and kvm, I saw the VM I had previously created was automatically made available on the hypervisor. How come? This meant that somehow the config files or whatever had been kept somewhere, even though I thought I had deleted everything. That didn’t bode well. Indeed, when I tried to open the VM… sure enough, the same error message was there.

With Wine, it’s the same: when you think you’re autoremoving or purging or cleaning, you’re in fact just telling Ubuntu not to execute some files, but no actual deleting seems to occur. They just sort of retire to a private life of their own.

Short of re-formating a computer, is there a way to really, completely, totally delete a program and its related files and references from a computer, and then do a really, completely, totally new install as if the computer and the program had never been introduced to each other before?

Pabzum
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  • Thanks for the link. I’ll study that. Looks like a lot of hard work. Installing programs in Linux turns out to be like starting a family: very easy to start one; very hard to get out of. :-) – Pabzum Nov 19 '16 at 18:27
  • Well, you can reinstall or restore the whole Ubuntu operating system. If you have a good (and recent) backup it is often easier, than to search for problematic files, that were created by some application program without letting you know about it :-) – sudodus Nov 19 '16 at 20:11

1 Answers1

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the issue you encounter, is more of an feature than a bug. Yeah sounds crazy, but bare with me.

As you might have noticed Linux puts all it files and bits at different places, this (mostly) follows the File Hierarchy Standard - more on Wikipedia. And in there under 3.8. /home : User home directories they write besides others following :

User specific configuration files for applications are stored in the user’s home directory in a file that starts with the ’.’ character (a "dot file"). If an application needs to create more than one dot file then they should be placed in a subdirectory with a name starting with a ’.’ character, (a "dot directory"). In this case the configuration files should not start with the ’.’ character.

These files are deliberately not touched when uninstalling software. So when a user takes it's home to another machine he/she keeps her/his configurations.

About your specific situation:

  • wine stores the windows-program's files under ~/.wine/ if you want to uninstall one program go use their helper program winecfg if you want to get of everything you installed inside wine you can simply go and delete the above mentioned folder.
  • virt-manager stores it's configuration via the gconf-settings-system. You can edit them without starting the program by using dconf-editor, respectably theses are stored under ~/.gconf/apps/virt-manager/ - yet with standard settings new virt-images are stored in /var/lib/libvirt/images so if you want to get rid of created images you simply have to delete them there.

A quick way to get more knowledge about Ubuntu, besides trouble shoot questions on this site might be reading http://ubuntu-manual.org/.

d1bro
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