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I did an 'apt-get remove' on a whole bunch of packages including zip, curl, libx11-dev, libglib2.0-dev, etc. and, after I did that, nearly all of my applications have silently disappeared (I believe that that is what caused it although I'm not 100%... I also uninstalled my python installation and did some other stuff before I finally went to go and open a program [terminal] and found that most of my programs were gone including ubuntu software center, etc... basically nearly everything). Does anyone know what may have caused this or, better, how to refresh everything? (no, I didn't create a restore point :-( ) Or, am I hosed?

Bruno Pereira
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fatfreddyscat
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3 Answers3

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Software-center depends on python. you may want to try installing (or reinstalling) the ubuntu-desktop meta package, this should get you back basic essentials,

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

if it is allready insalled remove it ( sudo apt-get remove ubuntu-desktop ) then install it, don't worry it's a meta package, that is used to install and update a set of packages, What exactly is in ubuntu-desktop?

Community
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Mateo
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That's easy to recover ;-P

First , find out all what you just removed by:

grep remove /var/log/dpkg.log

And re-install things needed by

sudo apt-get install XX

Don't care about dependencies , just find the packages you need , they will be installed automatically.

daisy
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Your programs weren't 'silently' removed. Packages in Ubuntu have 'dependencies', other packages that need to be installed for them to function properly. The Ubuntu Software Centre depends on Python, so when you uninstalled Python, Software Centre was also removed because it wouldn't have worked without its dependencies.

apt-get does warn you when it's going to remove packages like this. Next time you're removing things with apt-get remove, read over the lists of packages that are going to be removed. Any extra packages that will be uninstalled that you didn't specify will be listed under a heading like "The following extra packages will be uninstalled:". Pay attention to exactly what apt-get is going to do, and you should be able to avoid future catastrophes.

Marius
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