[PLUG] Dpkg -l and --purge

[John Jason Jordan]

I'm having bizarro things going on with OpenOffice.org 2.0.4 on Edgy amd64. Because of problems with OOo after upgrading from Dapper to Edgy, which also upgraded OOo 2.0.2 to 2.0.4, I did a complete uninstall of 2.0.4 with Synaptic, then used dpkg to install some debs I found for OOo 2.1 (2.1 is not in the Ubuntu amd64 repositories yet). The install went fine, but OOo 2.1 is awful. And the upgrade didn't fix the problems I had with 2.0.4. So I uninstalled 2.1 (with Synaptic) and then reinstalled 2.0.4 (again, with Synaptic). And now I have even more problems with 2.0.4.

I have done a complete uninstall of 2.0.4 with Synaptic ("complete uninstall" is supposed to remove all configuration files as well), and renamed the ~/.openoffice2 folder which holds my personal settings, then reinstalled. And doing so didn't fix a thing. Same broken installation. (Lots of stuff not working that has worked since I started with OOo several years ago.)

So just now I did dpkg -l to find a list of everything installed, which showed that openoffice.org-core02 was listed as "rc." This package is from 2.1, not 2.0.4, so I decided to nuke it for sure. (OOo 2.0.4 uses just one file named -core; OOo 2.1 uses -core01 to -core09.) I did the following:

jjj at Devil5:~$ dpkg -l *openoffice.org-core0*
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Installed/Config-files/Unpacked/Failed-config/Half-installed
|/ Err?=(none)/Hold/Reinst-required/X=both-problems (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name                         Version                      Description
+++-============================-============================-========================================================================
pn  openoffice.org-core01        <none>                       (no description available)
rc  openoffice.org-core02        2.1.0-6                      Office core module for OpenOffice.org 2.1
pn  openoffice.org-core03        <none>                       (no description available)
pn  openoffice.org-core03u       <none>                       (no description available)
pn  openoffice.org-core04        <none>                       (no description available)
pn  openoffice.org-core04u       <none>                       (no description available)
pn  openoffice.org-core05        <none>                       (no description available)
pn  openoffice.org-core05u       <none>                       (no description available)
pn  openoffice.org-core06        <none>                       (no description available)
pn  openoffice.org-core07        <none>                       (no description available)
pn  openoffice.org-core08        <none>                       (no description available)
pn  openoffice.org-core09        <none>                       (no description available)
jjj at Devil5:~$ dpkg -l *openoffice.org-core02*
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Installed/Config-files/Unpacked/Failed-config/Half-installed
|/ Err?=(none)/Hold/Reinst-required/X=both-problems (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name                         Version                      Description
+++-============================-============================-========================================================================
rc  openoffice.org-core02        2.1.0-6                      Office core module for OpenOffice.org 2.1
jjj at Devil5:~$ sudo apt-get --purge remove openoffice.org-core-02
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
E: Couldn't find package openoffice.org-core-02

Note that dpkg -l shows it as "rc," but the man page doesn't exactly say what that means except that it means "remove" and "config files." Does "remove" mean it is installed and should be removed? Or that it has been removed? Or what? Anyway, I tried to purge it, but I guess it ain't there.

I have done a complete uninstall of 2.0.4 via Synaptic, followed by a reinstall of just the base program (none of the optional goodies), but something is still screwing it up. It worked before installing OOo 2.1, so 2.1 left something behind or messed up something else. I want to nuke both installations so I can be sure that all remnants of both are gone, then reinstall. Can anyone suggest a way to be absolutely sure everything from both 2.0.4 and 2.1 is gone?