How to uninstall ROS2 Jazzy Jalisco in Ubuntu

Author: Aleksandar Haber
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In this tutorial, we explain how to properly uninstall ROS2 Jazzy Jalisco in Ubuntu 24.04. The YouTube tutorial accompanying this webpage is given below.

There are a number of reasons why someone would like to uninstall ROS2. For example, you would like to uninstall ROS2 such that you can perform a clean installation in order to confirm a minimum number of packages that need to be installed in order to run a ROS2 program or a package. Then, you would like to uninstall ROS2 since the current installation of ROS2 might be corrupted and you need to uninstall it.

However, the process of uninstalling a program in Linux Ubuntu is NOT a trivial process, mainly because even if we run the command for uninstalling a program, there might be some configuration files that will not be removed from our system. Next time you install a program, these old configuration files will be automatically loaded. Consequently, it is very important to know how to cleanly uninstall a program in Linux Ubuntu.

First, let us make sure that we installed ROS2. To confirm that ROS2 is installed, open a terminal and go to this folder

cd /opt/ros

and type

ls -la

and if ROS2 is installed you should see a folder whose name is “jazzy”. Then, let us confirm that we can source the environment

source /opt/ros/jazzy/setup.bash

and if ROS2 is installed, then by typing

printenv ROS_DISTRO

We should see “jazzy” as an output. Then to uninstall ROS2, type this

sudo apt remove ~nros-jazzy-*
sudo apt autoremove
sudo apt upgrade

Then try this:

sudo apt-get purge ros-jazzy-ros-base
sudo apt-get purge ~nros-jazzy-*

In the home folder there is a hidden .ros folder, so let us erase it

cd ~
rm -rfv ~/.ros

Then, the hidden configuration folder .config might contain these two ros and Gazebo folders:

rm -rfv ~/.config/ros.org
rm -rfv ~/.config/Gazebo

Then, let us install plocate and search for any folder or filename containing the word ros, ros2, jazzy, and similar names. To do that, we need to install plocate which a very useful and very fast command line tool for searching for files and folders.

sudo apt install plocate
sudo updatedb

Then, search for any file or folder containing the names such as “ros”, “ros2”, “jazzy”

plocate ros2
plocate jazzy2

and erase the files and folders by using the command “rm -rfv” and by specifying the path and file name that are found by the command plocate.