Remove Virtualbox installed via deb packages – Debian 11

Last updated on March 23rd, 2023 at 09:37 am.

If you download a .deb package and successfully install an app using sudo dpkg -i thedebpackage.deb, you can uninstall it. It is not as straightforward as using apt. Here is how to uninstall a Debian app installed via a downloaded deb package.

Step 1: Find the name of the package as installed on your system:

dpkg -l | grep virtualbox

The name will usually start with virtualbox -version. ( example : virtualbox-7.0)

Step 2: Run the following to remove it. Replace virtualboxNameHere with the name you got from above.

sudo dpkg -r  virtualboxNameHere

#Eaxmple:

sudo dpkg -r virtualbox-7.0

To remove it plus all its configuration files do:

sudo dpkg --purge virtualboxNameHere

#Example:

sudo dpkg --purge virtualbox-7.0

If a package has dependencies preventing you from uninstalling it, then list all the dependencies plus the package. Delimit each package by a white-space. For example, below is how I removed Libre office 7.4 from Debian:

 sudo dpkg --purge libreoffice7.4 libreoffice7.4-base libreoffice7.4-calc  libreoffice7.4-debian-menus libreoffice7.4-dict-en  libreoffice7.4-dict-es   libreoffice7.4-dict-fr libreoffice7.4-draw libreoffice7.4-en-us libreoffice7.4-impress libreoffice7.4-math  libreoffice7.4-ure  libreoffice7.4-writer

This is how you can remove any package, not just Virtualbox if it was installed via a downloaded deb package.

Bonus : To remove packages installed via apt, you can simply do:

sudo apt remove thepackage

#or remove with dependencies

sudo apt autoremove thepackage

#or remove it with all its configuration files

sudo apt --purge thepackage