Uninstalling tar.bz2 - make unavailable

[metta2012]

Okay so I'm still pretty new to Linux and this is a question that has confused the hay out of me for quite awhile now.

Okay so I'm always looking for a good program for file transfering to my AIM (windows) friend, and I wanted to try QNext. Now it's not available on Synaptic Package Manager.

Now of course I prefer to do it the simple way but I like to try out different applications to find the best.

Well Qnext wasn't what I was looking for.

So now I want to uninstall it.

I installed it into a certain folder. It was a tar.bz2

So here's what I've got

@rain-desktop:~/DLs/Apps/qnext$ ls
261616
errors
linux.jar
scripts
config.xml
extlang.jar
native
security.xml
config.xml.bak
formats.xml
proxy.xml
services
console.txt
jmf_linux.jar
qnext
skins
debug
jmf.properties
qnextclient
Uninstall.dat
detect.jmf.properties
jre1.5.0_11
qnext.jar
user.keys
dictionaries
jvm.linux.jar
qnext.lock
dictionary.jar
language
readme.txt
emoticon.jar
language.jar
report.jar

Okay so when I try to do make uninstall or sudo make uninstall I get

make: *** No rule to make target `uninstall'. Stop.

Which means what?

How would I properly remove such a program that only has an uninstall.dat


Also, and my biggest question. Should I ALWAYS install Make before I EVER start using a freshly installed system?

Thanks so much for the help I hope this was enough information.

Oh and yes I have navigated to the file I am currently IN the file in Terminal where the Qnext file is located.

[scorp123]

It would help if you explained how you *installed* that application. Where did you take the idea from that 'make uninstall' is the right command here? It's obvious to me that it must be wrong, because if this app involved compiling then you'd already have noticed that you're missing the 'make' command.

How about just removing the folder you created? (assuming that no files were copied to any other locations....)

[metta2012]

Well if you just delete the folder, are you really deleting the entire program, it's structure, and everything?

I used
tar xvjf qnextsetup.tar

Okay.. what's the difference between "tar" ing an application and "make"ing an application and how do you tell which process you have to do with a particular application?

What files do you look for in the .tar.gz or tar.bz2 folder that tells you that you have to use tar or you can just unzip it and use make?

I think that part confuses me more than anything.

http://qnext.com/download_linux.php

There's the suggestion on how to install it. I pretty much did that except I didn't use bunzip2

Thanks for the help

[scorp123]

Well if you just delete the folder, are you really deleting the entire program, it's structure, and everything?

Usually not. But as I see it you haven't installed anything, you just unpacked an archive which created a folder. So it will be sufficient if we just get rid of that one.

tar xvjf qnextsetup.tar

That's the command to unpack a *.bz2 archive ("j" switch up there ..... for *.gz archives you'd use the "z" switch). But that doesn't yet install anything. It just unpacks an archive.

Okay.. what's the difference between "tar" ing an application and "make"ing an application

"tar" stands for "Tape Archiver", it's an old UNIX command that archives and unarchives files. By itself it is not able to compress stuff, so that's why you'd use it in conjunction with compressors such as "compress" (giving *.tar.Z files), "gzip" (*.tar.gz), "bzip2" (*.tar.bz2) and even "zip" (*.tar.zip ... pretty rare though).

"make" is a compiler command. It requires a so called 'Makefile' which instructs the C-compiler where to find the source code and how to compile your stuff. For such a 'Makefile' to be created you'd first need to run the "./configure" command. So step by step this would be:

Code: Select all

./configure
make
make install

I don't recommend this stuff to newbies. It's much safer to you to stick to the things that 'apt' and 'Synaptic' offer you.

What files do you look for in the .tar.gz or tar.bz2 folder that tells you that you have to use tar or you can just unzip it and use make?

Again, this highly depends on what you downloaded and how this stuff is supposed to be installed. There is no general rule. Safest thing would be to read the instructions on the web page where you downloaded this stuff from. Or check if there is a 'README' file somewhere somehow.