We sometimes find what we are looking for while searching for something completely different. This happened to me recently. I was searching for a way to fix some graphic performance issues being experienced on kubuntu, when I stumbled upon (no pun intended) a packaged named ppa-purge. The name is self explanatory and it sounded like something that a dude like me who can be on the bleeding edge at times would need. I went on to install it. Like the name suggests, ppa-purge allows you to easy remove a PPA from your repository sources.
There’s a PPA for that
PPA is means Personal Package Archive. It provides a way to easily install application which can not be found in the Ubuntu official repository on Ubuntu ( since the Ubuntu official repo takes a conservative approach to updates and number of applications it includes in its official repository with focus on stability over latest and greatest packages.) PPA is one of the coolest thing about Ubuntu. It creates an avenue for developers, packagers and even users to create their own personal repositories and include their packages which can easily be added and installed on Ubuntu.
The down-side of all these is that most of the applications contained in a PPA can be quite too bleeding edge and not as well tested as what comes with the Ubuntu repos, so the users would sometimes want to revert back to the official Ubuntu packages. This is where PPA-Purge comes in handy
PPA-PURGE: ppa-purge will reset all packages from a PPA to the standard versions released for your distribution. So basically its like a way to restore your system back to the way it was before you installed packages from a PPA.
Installation: ppa-purge is very easy to install. You can grab a deb executable file directly from the web page of the xorg-edgers repository
Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope)
Usage
ppa-purge is very easy to use.How this works is e.g If I wanted to remove say the blueman PPA I just go to terminal and paste the following
sudo ppa-purge ppa:blueman/ppa/
A break down of how this work is
sudo ppa-purge ppa:repository-name/subdirectory
e.g ‘deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/blueman/ppa/ubuntu karmic main’ the part in bold is the part you need to add to
sudo ppa-purge ppa:
to make it
sudo ppa-purge ppa:blueman/ppa
I actually tried the tool after I installed the xorg-edger repository to see if it would solve my graphic display issues, unfortunately it only made things worse, thankfully I was able to use ppa-purge to remove the PPA and reset (downgrade) my packages back to the default version on karmic.
So there you have it. You can go on installing all the latest and greatest packages using the Ubuntu PPA. knowing full well you have something to fall back on. I hope someone finds this useful.
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