Ubuntu – How to download deb from a PPA

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:

• Go to System → Administration → Synaptic Package Manager
• Click the Status button and select "Installed (local or obsolete)"
• Right click a package and select "mark for removal".

• Click the Apply button.

  This will have the benefit of listing all of your manually installed packages:

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.

Can a control file from a deb package contain a PPA address and install that package when the deb file is installed?

No. You can only control the name of the package and the version via control file. Why you could do is creating a package that adds a file under /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ with the repository, but it implies a two steps process:

1. Install the package with the repository, update package list.
2. Install your package.

Informing your users before hand that they should add first the PPA you need removes the need of having to install the first package and updating the list to just installing your packages. Through adding a third party repository that you don't control (and the user possibly doesn't trust) could cause a security concern, since the third party repository isn't obligated to only serve only the packages you need but whatever packages the owner decides, i.e. adding a rouge version of openssl that replaces Ubuntu's. That's why is recommendable to try hard and only set as dependency packages that either are in Ubuntu's repositories or provide those packages yourself.