Completely removing texlive

Question

I upgraded to texlive 2017 but had some issues with it and therefore wanted to go back to the 2015 version. I removed it with sudo apt-get purge --auto-remove texlive* but it did not seem to remove everything. When I try sudo apt-get install texliveI get the following error:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

    The following packages have unmet dependencies.
     libosgi-compendium-java : Depends: libgeronimo-jpa-2.0-spec-java but it is not going to be installed
     texlive : Depends: texlive-latex-recommended (>= 2015) but it is not going to be installed
               Depends: texlive-latex-base (>= 2015) but it is not going to be installed
               Depends: texlive-fonts-recommended (>= 2015) but it is not going to be installed
    E: Error, pkgProblemResolver::Resolve generated breaks, this may be caused by held packages.

I then tried to follow the steps explained in this post but it did not help in this situation. Any ideas?

Thanks in advance!

There are three different answers at that link. Which did you do, and which step went wrong? Did you remove the TexLive 2017 source? — user535733, Oct 16 '17 at 14:29
I went with the accepted answer (I edited the question so it links there now). Nothing went wrong really, just that the problem remains. I used sudo ppa-purge ppa:jonathonf/texlive-2017 to remove the ppa if this what you mean. — jan1892, Oct 16 '17 at 14:35
If you got "held packages" problems for dependencies, you may try aptitude. This tool makes one or more suggestions of which packages upgrade or downgrade to solve the conflicts, and if you accept one of them, it performs the changes. There are many questions showing other solutions for held packages. — Jaime, Oct 16 '17 at 14:39
one of the suggestion given by aptitude install texlive fixed the problem. Thanks! — jan1892, Oct 16 '17 at 15:05

Reza Rahemi · Answer 1 · 2018-05-14T01:14:45.923

1

Try removing the full package (texlive-full). There might be some residuals from dependencies. Good luck.

  sudo apt-get purge --autoremove texlive-full

This might help fix the broken packages:

sudo apt-get install -f
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo dpkg --configure -a

Something to consider if the above didn't work:

sudo apt-get purge texlive*
sudo rm -rf /usr/local/texlive/* and rm -rf ~/.texlive*
sudo rm -rf /usr/local/share/texmf
sudo rm -rf /var/lib/texmf
sudo rm -rf /etc/texmf
sudo apt-get remove tex-common --purge
rm -rf ~/.texlive

find -L /usr/local/bin/ -lname /usr/local/texlive/*/bin/* | xargs rm

edited May 14 '18 at 01:14

answered May 05 '18 at 17:48

Reza Rahemi

263
1
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This has been solved a while ago. Your suggestion was obviously the first thing I tried and it didn't work as explained in the question. – jan1892 May 05 '18 at 18:12
So did you try texlive* or texlive-full? – Reza Rahemi May 05 '18 at 18:27
Both. Note that texlive-full should be contained in texlive*. – jan1892 May 05 '18 at 18:32
I see. Did you also remove /usr/local/texlive/2017? (assuming you wanted to keep 2015) – Reza Rahemi May 05 '18 at 18:37
Yes. The problem was with some held packages. What is your interest in this anyway, do you have the same problem? – jan1892 May 05 '18 at 18:41
Yes, but not with texlive. From my experience with other programs, some of them understand that you are trying to go back a version and some don't. I was wondering why we get this error sometimes :) Isn't it because of the discrepancy between the versions? (2015 vs 2017 names) – Reza Rahemi May 05 '18 at 18:42
Did you also try sudo apt-get install -f? – Reza Rahemi May 05 '18 at 18:51
Not that I remember (it's some time ago and was solved quite quickly). – jan1892 May 05 '18 at 18:57
Thanks for providing the information. Hopefully these might help somebody (hopefully the developers) in the future. – Reza Rahemi May 05 '18 at 23:58

Completely removing texlive

1 Answers1