Uninstall packages installed thru armbian-config/softy

[spicedreams]

Hi, my base problem is syncthing not starting on boot. But in trying to solve that it would be useful to uninstall and reinstall syncthing via armbian-config and hence softy.

 

But armbian-config/softy does not let me uninstall syncthing (or for that matter samba, which I also don't want or need on that machine). 

 

Nor does apt: 

sudo apt-get remove --purge samba

reports "Package 'samba' is not installed, so not removed", though armbian-config/softy shows it as installed. 

 

Is there a way to uninstall packages installed via armbian-config/softy?

Thanks

Graham

 

[Igor]

34 minutes ago, spicedreams said:

Is there a way to uninstall packages installed via armbian-config/softy?

No. Uninstall is not implemented. Surely it could be done for samba for example, but for some complex install is rather hard to achieve. Armbian provides this utility as is. Last time I was trying to install Syncthing, it was working out of the box. Are you using Stretch perhaps or some 3rd party Linux?

 

The tool itself might report installed components wrongly. It works correctly only on a clean install since checking is done this way: 

SAMBA_STATUS="$([[ -f /etc/samba/smb.conf ]] && echo "on" || echo "off" )"

Sources: https://github.com/armbian/config 

[tkaiser]

1 hour ago, Igor said:

The tool itself might report installed components wrongly. It works correctly only on a clean install since checking is done this way

 

Which is obviously wrong since removed packages might leave config files behind (purge would remove those too). Maybe relying on 'dpkg -s' is a better choice eg. by parsing output from:

dpkg -s samba 2>/dev/null | awk -F": " '/^Status/ {print $2}'

For an installed Samba this will result most probably in 'install ok installed' (first word the desired state, last one the current state, this relates to the first three characters spitten out by 'dpkg -l' but in different order -- see this summary for example). If Samba is not installed (but config file existing since only removed but not purged before) then the string will be empty.

 

If Samba install is somehow broken (mismatch between first and last word and something different than 'ok' in between) an appropriate choice would be to inform the user to fix installation manually?

[Igor]

I see we need to add startup service. Does not want to run from rc.local ...

https://docs.syncthing.net/users/autostart.html

 

Will fix this tomorrow.

[Igor]

@spicedreams

 

Fixed in sources.

https://github.com/armbian/config/commit/4ba722496a959bf3b2b477c89e66cce21fec91bc

 

[Guest]

I'm sorry, it's an old thread, but why is there no uninstall implemented in Softy? That would be logical? Alternatively you have to reinstall the whole system now? So Softy is pointless.

[Robin Gerritsen]

So I am stuck also? I installed Sonarr, but it wouldn't work, so I installed it with Docker, during the installation Sonarr appeared to be working. But after the docker installation Sonarr crashed. So I want to reinstall Sonarr with Softy, but first I need to remove it... Or there is a way to repair/reinstall... 

[Poincare]

I also installed OMV via Softy but now would like to uninstall it.  Softy doesn't seem to support uninstall, as of May 2019, and apt purge didn't seem to also remove `openmediavault`.  Does anyone have a clean way to properly uninstall OMV (via Softy?) or do I have to completely reinstall Armbian to get a system without it?

[Igor]

5 hours ago, Poincare said:

I also installed OMV via Softy but now would like to uninstall it.  Softy doesn't seem to support uninstall, as of May 2019, and apt purge didn't seem to also remove `openmediavault`.  Does anyone have a clean way to properly uninstall OMV (via Softy?) or do I have to completely reinstall Armbian to get a system without it?

OMV installs all sorts/a lot of applications and junk on the system which means cleaning is a complex operation which has to be maintained with the same insensitivity as installer, while virtually nobody has an interest to do that.

 

You can check OMV forums but I seriously doubt there is any "OMV cleaner" out there. Starting from a clean image is the best and recommended option.

[Nurettin Alp]

I have got same problem can't uninstall Openhab 3 and Openhab 2.

[Igor]

1 hour ago, Nurettin Alp said:

I have got same problem can't uninstall Openhab 3 and Openhab 2.

Not implemented, perhaps in the future, if there will be enough help:

 

[spicedreams]

Given how troublesome uninstall seems to be, perhaps the only viable approach is to backup your Armbian instance before installing something new.

 I would backup by shutting down Armbian, transferring the disk media to a linux machine and using dd. This unfortunately creates a rather large image file. Is there a better way to backup the OS state without including all the disk's empty space?
 

[Heisath]

Can always use rsync to just copy the files of the root. Theres plenty of tutorials on how to backup your root drive with rsync. 

 

I use something like:
 

rsync -aAXh --stats --info=progress2 --delete --exclude={"/dev/*","/proc/*","/sys/*","/tmp/*","/run/*","/mnt/*/*","/media/*","/lost+found"} / <TARGET_DIR>

 

[spicedreams]

Thanks Heisath, I am trying out a slight modification on that.

I need to work out how to make that into a bootable SD card, but the bones are probably there.

 

[Heisath]

For bootable sd card, I'd just burn a fresh armbian image and rsync the original filesystem in there. This way you have an easy spare. Or you could try to shrink your partition before doing the dd.

[spicedreams]

I ended up with subtly different syntax. I have a real HDD on /mnt/data and I backing up to it so I must exclude it from the backup:

 

sudo rsync -aAxXh --exclude={'dev','lost+found','media','mnt','proc','run','sys','tmp'} --stats --info=progress2 --delete / /mnt/data/armbian-backup

 

The main difference though is that I just include the directory names. Prefixing them with / would make you think they are root relative whereas they are actually relative to the source directory. Suffixing them with /* would cause the directories themselves to be included in the backup, just empty. 

It took me a lot of experimentation to realise the syntax --exclude={'list','of',directories','to','exclude'} is finicky about quoting individual excludes. I spent some time trying --exclude-from=filename but never got that to work satisfactorily.