Corrupt Pidgin - Unable to remove

Solution 1:

It looks like there's a new version of pidgin-facebookchat and APT prefers to upgrade first before purging/removing packages.

First do what apt-get recommends:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -f install
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

It will try to update, fix any broken dependencies and fully upgrade (and no, dist-upgrade will not change your distribution version). You may remove or install packages, look through them carefully, so it doesn't remove any packages you like. Reboot if required.

Then try this command:

sudo apt-get purge pidgin.*

It will match and purge all packages whose name begins with "pidgin".

Also, you have some packages that were installed as dependencies. You may remove/purge them using:

sudo apt-get autoremove --purge

Oh and there's a slight difference between apt-get remove and apt-get purge. Remove removes the package files except some configuration files (residing in /etc/). Purge completely uninstalls the package with all its files. So, if you don't need any /etc/ configuration (i.e. if you haven't changed them), you may prefer apt-get purge.

Purge does not touch the files in user home folders, i.e. it won't remove /home/myuser/.pidgin folder.