Installing from source, no deinstall options in the make file? No problem! – Use checkinstall instead!
On Debian based operating systems, such as Ubuntu, installing software from source often causes issues when we want to remove it. However, with this little gem (that has somehow avoided me up until now) you can remove software built from source just as if you had installed it from a package! – Checkinstall monitors where a source installation copies its files/folders and builds a .deb file based upon what happened. This can then be used to remove the software using aptitude purge ‘package name’ as you would with a package installed from the repos! How cool is that!
Just aptitude install checkinstall, run your ./configure && make && checkinstall (replacing make install with checkinstall) – it will ask you some options, such as what to do with the doc files, what to name the package and if it should clean up after itself (accepting defaults should be fine) and away you go. HTH.
Hi. I'm Matt Newham, 23 years old. I'm a network security engineer, specializing in Intrusion Detection.
