OK, here goes the uninstallation part. Uninstallation is even more messy than installation!
1. If u want to uninstall any software that was part of the distro, then it should be really easy. No brainer at all. Every distro has some form of add/remove software. For ex. in fedora core, u just goto fedora menu>>system>>add/remove & then uncheck whatever u want to remove & then click apply.
2. Same for programs installed by yumex/synaptic. Open the same, & select the programs u wanna remove & click apply. This thing should be really easy. Not much explantion required.
3. Uninstalling programs installed using rpms is a bit tricky. The format is
rpm -e <name> (u need root priveledges to do this). Now the interesting part is to know what u have to type in the place of <name>. For example if u installed a program called 'niceprogram' using an rpm named 'niceprogram-1.2.fc5.i386.rpm' . The trick is to know what to type after rpm -e , cause u can't simply type the rpm name again. It doesn't work that way. To know what to type, u need to type
rpm -qa | more
& then sort through the list until u find the program that u need to uninstall. You have to use the same name that was used in the list. If u don't want to sort through the entire list, u can use wildcard characters, for ex, in our case, we could use
rpm -qa n*
which would give us the list of all programs starting with letter 'n'
Similarly, for deb files, we would use dkpg --list to query & dpkg -r <name> to uninstall.
This is the way to uninstall programs installed using rpms & deb files. Atleast this is how I do it. If someone knows a better way to do it, please let us know.
4. Now for uninstalling programs installed using those special binary files (.bin, .run , etc)
Uninstalling these is a little interesting (atleast more entertaining than uninstalling rpms). First u need to find out where the program has been installed. U can do this by searching for it. Then navigate to that folder & generally u will have an uninstall script. Just open the terminal, use the su command & get root priveledges. Then type
./uninstall or
sh uninstall (or whatever else the script name maybe, instead of uninstall, u may have remove or somthing like that)
If none of the above techniques work, then simply find the folder that the program has been installed in & delete it.
This will do the job. Hope this guide helps.