Problem removing GCC

[Windy]

Hi All,
I have an old laptop which I was configuring for some cross-development work (ARM based Embedded System), I needed to install an older version of GCC; from previous (painfull) experience I have found it better to remove the existing development tools prior to installing the (supplied) cross-developent tools, with other distro's of Linux (Debian, Gentoo, BSD) this has not been a problem; however with Kubuntu when I uninstall GCC Adept proceeded to uninstall everything bar Memtest (well, everything until it crashed due to removing utilities needed to do the uninstall!).

Can anyone tell me why it needs to uninstall EVERYTHING just to remove GCC? and how I can remove GCC and leave the system in a state where it will at least boot!

[jankushka]

Re: Problem removing GCC

Can anyone tell me why it needs to uninstall EVERYTHING just to remove GCC?

my guess is libstdc* has been made to depend on gcc
given everything depends on libstdc, ...

and how I can remove GCC and leave the system in a state where it will at least boot!

dpkg --purge maybe?
not sure.
something that don't look at dependencies, anyway...