Problem with uninstalling virtualbox

Question

I am using Ubuntu 12.10.

I downloaded from virtualbox.org the virtualbox package 4.2.4*.deb.

I wanted to install it with dpkg -i and terminal requested me to use command alien instead.

So I did alien <package> then dpkg -i <package> and used virtualbox.

Now I want to uninstall virtualbox (because something went wrong) because it was not installed with sudo apt-get install.

I want to use command dpkg -e <package> or dpkg --purge <package> but this ends with report

file or directory not found

Then

sudo dpkg -l | grep virtualbox

reports:

ii  virtualbox-4.2                                  4.2.4-81684~Ubuntu~quantal                     amd64        Oracle VM VirtualBox
rc  virtualbox-qt                                   4.1.18-dfsg-1ubuntu1.1                         amd64        x86 virtualization solution - Qt based user interface

what should I do next ?

Answer 1

Run this command in a terminal window:

sudo apt-get purge virtualbox-4.2 virtualbox-qt

That should remove them both.

Answer 2

You can also use sudo apt-get purge virtualbox*, which should also remove both.

Answer 3

Try like this

sudo apt-get --remove purge virtualbox-4.2 virtualbox-qt

Answer 4

I also had run like this

sudo apt-get purge virtualbox-\*

But was not removing completely

To me following worked (Was trying this on Ubuntu 15.10 and Oracle Virtualbox 5.x)

dpkg -l | grep virtualbox

which listed as below

# dpkg -l | grep virtualbox ii virtualbox-5.0:i386 5.0.12 104815~Ubuntu~wily i386 Oracle VM VirtualBox

Then i used the command

sudo apt-get purge virtualbox-5.0:i386