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….for the benefit of other people who might find totally jargonized help-files or howtos or documentation completely opaque, I’m posting in PLAIN HUMAN LANGUAGE about my amarok problems and how I finally solved them.
I’m using ubuntu breezy, and I installed amarok from synaptic package manager, which pulled sqlite and the kde binares/files that it also needs.
At one point, I tried to delete all files from my amarok collection so that I could re-load them to solve what I thought was a problem with it missreading some id3 tags. After I tried to uncheck the folder for my music library, amarok was unable to rebuild my collection successfully. I suspected that this was a problem with the sqlite database, but I couldn’t locate the database file itself and didn’t know how to interact with sqlite through the command line, so I tried to uninstall everything and reinstall everything from scratch to try to solve this problem. (Also, i didn’t want to take the time to learn how to configure mysql and switch to that database instead.)
I ran into problems locating all the hidden files to successfully remove them after I uninstalled amarok and sqlite from synaptic.
The following are the two major locations of amarok references that you have to manually remove in order to completely uninstall amarok and sqlite:
~/.kde/share/apps/amarok/
~/.kde/share/config/amarokrc
In nautilus, go to View and choose “show hidden files” and browse to the .kde directory.
Another step I took was to install Deborphan and use it in synaptic to create a custom filter to find all orphaned dependencies. Also, DON’T FORGET TO EMPTY YOUR TRASH.
I also used sudo updatedb and then sudo locate amarok and sudo locate sqlite in the terminal to locate references to the name (once I learned about these commands).
I tried using the application called Beagle to search for instances of keywords in my filesystem in nautilus, but it never found a single file I was looking for so I consider it useless.
I also rebooted for good luck before I reinstalled but I don’t know if this is necessary.
I consider this kind of thorough manual search-and-destroy method a good technique for uninstalling most user-installed applications and programs in linux (presumably debian based OSes like Ubuntu… since that’s all I’ve ever used.) Use synaptic or apt-get first, making sure to tell it to remove it completely, and then manually go in and destroy all config files.
Anyway, after all instances of amarok were gone from sudo locate amarok output, I simply reinstalled Amarok from synaptic and it pulled sqlite and all the other missing dependencies just like normal and just as if it was a fresh install.