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I recently installed Pidgin and tried to install pidgin-facebookchat. Ubuntu software center now says that pidgin is corrupt so I press repair but nothing gets fixed. I've tried sudo apt-get purge pidgin but I get this error:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
You might want to run 'apt-get -f install' to correct these:
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 pidgin-data : Breaks: pidgin-facebookchat (< 1.69-2) but 1.69 is to be installed
 pidgin-libnotify : Depends: pidgin (< 1:3.0) but it is not going to be installed
                    Depends: pidgin (>= 1:2.10) but it is not going to be installed
E: Unmet dependencies. Try 'apt-get -f install' with no packages (or specify a solution).

And sudo apt-get -f install results in this error

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Correcting dependencies... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
  language-pack-kde-zh-hans-base firefox-locale-zh-hans language-pack-kde-en kde-l10n-engb
  language-pack-zh-hans-base kde-l10n-zhcn language-pack-zh-hans language-pack-kde-zh-hans
  language-pack-kde-en-base
Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them.
The following extra packages will be installed:
  pidgin-facebookchat
The following packages will be upgraded:
  pidgin-facebookchat
1 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 31 not upgraded.
1 not fully installed or removed.
Need to get 0 B/39.8 kB of archives.
After this operation, 139 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y
dpkg: warning: there's no installed package matching pidgin-facebookchat:amd64

How can I uninstall Pidgin from my computer?, It is also blocking other applications from being installed.

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  • Have you tried sudo apt-get -f remove ? Jul 11, 2012 at 5:07

1 Answer 1

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It looks like there's a new version of pidgin-facebookchat and APT prefers to upgrade first before purging/removing packages.

First do what apt-get recommends:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -f install
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

It will try to update, fix any broken dependencies and fully upgrade (and no, dist-upgrade will not change your distribution version). You may remove or install packages, look through them carefully, so it doesn't remove any packages you like. Reboot if required.

Then try this command:

sudo apt-get purge pidgin.*

It will match and purge all packages whose name begins with "pidgin".

Also, you have some packages that were installed as dependencies. You may remove/purge them using:

sudo apt-get autoremove --purge

Oh and there's a slight difference between apt-get remove and apt-get purge. Remove removes the package files except some configuration files (residing in /etc/). Purge completely uninstalls the package with all its files. So, if you don't need any /etc/ configuration (i.e. if you haven't changed them), you may prefer apt-get purge.

Purge does not touch the files in user home folders, i.e. it won't remove /home/myuser/.pidgin folder.

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