On 01/21/2014 04:07 PM, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
On Tue, 2014-01-21 at 15:55 +0000, Filipe Coelho wrote:

I'd be tempted to remove what I just installed, but not all software
comes with a "make uninstall".

But that should be provided, if it shouldn't be provided, then taking a
look to the makefile might give some hints what was installed to what
location. Btw. it can't harm to at least try checkinstall instead of
make install, this is possible most of the times.

Well, first, it's up to the developers to provide that and not the user.
Second, I don't think *any* new user will understand what a Makefile does...

Regarding checkinstall, that's not a widely known trick.
I still meet new users on IRC and forums that never heard of it.


So crap... I had broken app X and I didn't knew how to fix it or to
revert to the previous condition...

Restoring from a backup? Even non-techie (non-power-users) should
consider to backup their complete Linux DAWs and data.

How do you backup an installed application?

In my case I had an older version of an app I wanted to upgrade.
The distribution didn't had the new version so I had to build one myself.
Because I was a noob something probably went wrong during the build, resulting in a broken app.
The app installed to /usr/local which overrides distro's /usr packages.
But I didn't knew that (noob alert ;)) so what could I have done?
Reinstalling the app's package did nothing (still /usr/local files present).

For a new Linux user, I understand this is when they start thinking about going back...