Manually installed packages appear in the Software Centre, along with all the others. Just search the software centre for your package and remove it there.
You may have to click on "Show N technical items"
Along with this, there are a few other methods:
Synaptic:
Command Line
You can either use sudo apt-get remove packagename
if you know the name of the package, or if you don't, search for it using apt-cache search crazy-app
and then remove it using apt get
You can also use dpkg --remove packagename
.
This will also let you know if there are any unneeded packages left on your system, which were possibly installed as dependencies of your .deb package. Use sudo apt-get autoremove
to get rid of them.
Below, I'm assuming that the source is open (e.g. Python scripts) which are therefore not bound to any architecture (e.g. amd64 or i386), hence "all". If you have some C source, you need to use Architecture: amd64 i386
in your source control
file.
creating package ready for Launchpad
This will eventually will become a series of individual launchpad PPA packages.
What I prefer (but may not be able to achieve...) is to keep my packaging to a minimum - create a series of packages from a template and adjust the bare minimum (changelog etc + the tar file).
Launchpad only accepts source packages, so create a rules
that installs the files in the correct places. For convenience, I'll use debhelper. The directory with your files should look like:
debian/changelog
debian/control
debian/rules
debian/compat
mypluginfolder/...
A debian/copyright
file may also be useful for informing users about the licenses associated with the package. I don't think you need a postinst
script since you only need to extract some files. compat
should contain the debhelper compatilbility level, say "8". (please refer to the manual page of debhelper for more details)
The changelog
file can be edited with the dch
command, available from the devscripts
package. The rules
(using debhelper) should contain:
#!/usr/bin/make -f
%:
dh $@
override_dh_install:
dh_install mypluginfolder/ /usr/share/rhythmbox/plugins
Make it executable using chmod 755 debian/rules
. A source package can be build using debuild -S
. Be sure to be in a directory named <package-name>-<version>
. More information about the override_
behavior and the dh
command can be found on its manual page.
The Debian New Maintainers' Guide was very valuable for me to understand this, it's recommended reading. Example packaging can be found on https://github.com/Bumblebee-Project/bumblebee-ppa.
creating package from existing file tree
dpkg-deb -b
can be used for creating tarballs from an existing file tree. First, start with creating a directory that should be named after your package. I'll assume you want to name it myplugin
, and put it in /usr/share/rhythmbox/plugins/mypluginfolder
. In addition, create the DEBIAN
directory (uppercase!) for storing package information:
mkdir -p myplugin/usr/share/rhythmbox/plugins/mypluginfolder
mkdir myplugin/DEBIAN
Copy over your files:
cp -r ~/mypluginsfolder myplugin/usr/share/rhythmbox/plugins
Next, you'll need a so-called control file located at myplugin/DEBIAN/control
which describes the package. The contents of such a file are put below:
Package: myplugin
Version: 1.0-1
Maintainer: You <whatever@contact.address>
Architecture: all
Description: plugins for Rhythmbox
Longer description here
.
As you can see, new paragraph are split by a single dot,
and lines have to be indented by one space.
Now, you can optionally verify the contents of your package. The next command lists the file and directory entries contents of myplugin
:
find myplugin -ls
If you're satisfied, build the package in the current directory:
dpkg-deb -b myplugin .
A new file will appear, named like <package>_<version>_<architecture>.deb
which is in this example myplugin_1.0-1_all.deb
. You can use the less
program to peek in the file. For example, less myplugin_1.0-1_all.deb
.
Best Answer
Creating packages is relatively straight forward. You essentially create a tarball, which could be unpacked at the root of your filesystem (the parallel directory structures), but in addition there is a debian folder, which contains scripts which can be run during the process.
I'm assuming you knew this, so I'm not sure exactly which bit of the process of creating a package, you're unclear on.
https://wiki.debian.org/HowToPackageForDebian
Will give you chapter and verse on creating the package
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Installing_extensions
Says putting .xpi files in a certain directory will cause firefox to install them on next startup
https://forum.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=804
Talks about using unopkg to install libreoffice packages from the command line.
If you want hired consultancy to do the grunt work for you, that's a different matter ;-)