Removing A MyDSL Extension

From DSL Wiki

MyDSL is not a package manager. It is intended mainly to be used in compressed-filesystem installations of DSL, specfically running from a live cd, embedded in another operating system, or a frugal system running in RAM or from some type of storage device. Removing myDSL extensions from these types of systems generally requires only a reboot.

If you happen to be running a "traditional-style" hard drive installation of DSL, in which all files are writeable and persistent, installing most types of myDSL extensions means that they are permanently installed. Removing *.uci packages is still only a matter of running mydsl-load on the package a second time to umount it, but *.tar.gz and *.dsl packages must be removed manually.
This article will try to explain the manual removal of myDSL extensions in this type of hard drive installation.

Removing myfile.tar.gz

MyDSL extensions whose filenames end with .tar.gz are installed into /opt, usually within a single subdirectory. If you know the name of your package then you know what subdirectory to find. Simply delete this subdirectory and the application is removed. What is left over are personal configuration files, which can be removed or left to sit there, and possibly a desktop icon and/or a menu entry each for Fluxbox and JWM.

Removing myfile.dsl

These packages present a much larger task for the harddrive-install user who wants to remove them. They are installed into the base system, with files spread out in various locations such as /usr/bin, /etc, /usr/X11R6/include, and other directories. In order to find out what files were installed, and where they are located, the easiest method is to look into the original myDSL package.

Step 1) Download the myDSL extension, if you no longer have the original file. You can do this with a web browser, wget, ftp client, or the mydsl-wget utility.
Step 2) Build a list of the files in the package: tar -ztf myfile.dsl > myfile.txt
Step 3) Use this list to find and remove the files that were installed

IMPORTANT: It is vital to mention here that some *.dsl packages may have installed files that overwrote existing files of the original DSL system, or installed files that are also required by other extensions. Please exercise extreme caution when removing these files, as this action may result in unwanted application failures. Files with the same name as the myDSL package are generally safe to remove without negative results, and these files are usually installed in share, bin and etc directories. Files installed in include directories are generally never used in typical day-to-day program use (used mostly for software development and building source applications), so these are also fairly safe. Files in lib directories are of particular importance here, since many programs share these library files.

Removing Personal Files

Personal configuration files for any given application are almost always filenames that are very similar to the name of the application, and they are found in the top level of /home/dsl. The file could be a single file, or it could be a directory, depending on the application. It usually has a filename which starts with a dot (a "hidden" file).
The icon is stored in /home/dsl/.xtdesktop, and consists of two files: an image file (usually png or gif) and a *.lnk file. Both of these files should have the same filename, with the exception of the filename extension, and this filename should be the same as the myDSL package name. Delete both of these files.
The menu item, if it exists, was written to two files, one for each window manager. In Fluxbox, the file is /home/dsl/.fluxbox/mydsl.menu. Simply find the one line that starts the removed application, delete that line, and save the file. In JWM, the file is /home/dsl/.jwmrc. Find the comment MyDSL Extension Menu Placeholder and look just below that for the line that starts the removed application. Delete that line and save the file.