How to dupplicate your packages selection
You may want to save your selection of packages, in order to reinstall all your softs later without having to look for and manually install them one after another.
On Debian / Ubuntu, this is quite easy.
A while ago the solution used to be :
$ dpkg --get-selections > file.txt
and then, an a freshed installed machine :
$ dpkg --set-selections < file.txt $ apt-get upgrade
But, for some reason I don’t know and that I would be happy to learn, it seems that this does not work anymore.
Below is the way I got it to work, though it is a little bit more complicated.
So, let’s save the selection of packages into a clean list file, though we are only interested in the packages names :
$ COLUMNS=200 dpkg -l | awk '/^[hi]i/{print $2}' | xargs > liste-apt.txt
and to install on the new machine :
$ cat liste-apt.txt | xargs apt-get install
So far, it worked very well on my servers ! APT is a great tool.
Related posts:
You can do it much easier with wajig.
wajig listinstalled > installed.txt
move the installed.txt file to the new machine and:
wajig fileinstall installed.txt
I haven’t tried yet this soft, but it seems to be a convenient wrapper, though I prefer to stick with the original program (apt or dpkg). Thanks.