The Spring Clean and the Wine

Every now and again I'm tempted to have a tidy up: I know that I shouldn't, but I just can't seem to help it.

To help you keep your system at peak running efficiency, Karmic has a Computer Janitor utility (System → Administration → Computer Janitor) which searches your computer and finds all those orphan programs and shared libraries that it thinks that you no longer need. If, like me, you are a trusting soul, the temptation is to simply click the Do Selected Tasks option and think no more about it: however, I urge caution!

This is the second time that I've used the utility only to find subsequently that I couldn't use Wine. I only use Wine to run a single program, Memory-Map and to be honest, it doesn't run particularly well: nonetheless, I have a great wide-screen monitor on my Ubuntu box and it makes for superb viewing of 1:25,000 scale maps. Anyway, long story short: it seemed easier to remove Wine completely and start from scratch than it did to try and repair the damage. I went to the command line and typed:

sudo apt-get remove wine

Typed in my password and waited for the system to do its thing. After removing Wine, I noticed that there was still an entry for the program in the Applications menu although nothing would work when I clicked on the shortcut. It turns out that the standard remove command doesn't remove the Windows applications, you have to remove the ~/wine directory manually.

Open a terminal and type:

rm -rf $HOME/.wine

Once the directory is gone, you can then remove the menu entries and desktop items:

rm -f $HOME/.config/menus/applications-merged/wine*
rm -rf $HOME/.local/share/applications/wine
rm -f $HOME/.local/share/desktop-directories/wine*
rm -f $HOME/.local/share/icons/????_*.xpm

Source: Wine HQ FAQ 5.1

Reinstalling Wine from the Ubuntu software Centre is easy enough and replacing the map viewer from Memory-Map didn't trouble me either but I will think more carefully about spring cleaning in the future!