I installed VLC player, but now I want to be fully rid of it, so I typed in the following command in Terminal:

sudo apt-get purge vlc

And it told me that it had purged it, but then in Terminal when I typed in vlc, this was the output (although no GUI launched):

VLC media player 2.2.0-pre2 Weatherwax (revision 2.2.0-pre1-15-g5178b24)
[0000000001f3bab8] core interface error: no suitable interface module
[0000000001f21118] core libvlc error: interface "globalhotkeys,none" initialization failed
[0000000001f21118] core libvlc: Running vlc with the default interface. Use 'cvlc' to use vlc without interface.
[00000000020f66d8] [cli] lua interface: Listening on host "*console".
VLC media player 2.2.0-pre2 Weatherwax
Command Line Interface initialized. Type 'help' for help.
> 

And if I type in help I get a proper response from the program. And it also allows me to type in and execute any associated command.

So how can I fully remove VLC Player so that when I execute the command vlc it tells me that it does not know that command?

I am currently running Ubuntu 14.10.

0

5 Answers

vlc depends on vlc-nox which installs the vlc command that you see. Remove it specifically, or use autoremove:

apt-get autoremove
# or
apt-get remove vlc-nox

6

None of the above will actually remove all vlc packages, (usually 6-7). Better to do -

sudo apt-get purge vlc-data

To remove a package and all its dependencies in one command, you can also directly pass the package name as argument to apt-get autoremove:

sudo apt-get autoremove vlc

If you prefer to purge the packages (to also clean up all configuration files), the way to go is this:

sudo apt-get autoremove --purge vlc

However, this will not work in your case, because of the complex dependency tree of vlc. autoremove only removes automatically packages which currently have no installed reverse-dependencies. That means as long as there are other packages which may depend on vlc's dependencies, they will stay. Those other packages are probably vlc-plugin-* packages which depend on vlc but get not removed with that first run yet...

However, if you keep firing sudo apt-get autoremove after that first line, apt-get should slowly start to realize that there's more to remove.

2

Use aptitude, a sometimes more intelligent alternative to apt-get.

If you run sudo aptitude remove vlc, it will detect possible conflicts that would result of removing vlc and suggests to remove all those other "hidden" dependencies which apt-get would have missed on the first run.

If you haven't installed aptitude yet, that can be done using sudo apt-get install aptitude.

Try to run these commands.

sudo apt-get remove vlc
sudo apt-get remove browser-plugin-vlc
sudo apt-get purge vlc

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Sign up using Google Sign up using Facebook Sign up using Email and Password Submit

Post as a guest

Post Your Answer Discard

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and cookie policy