# from John Jason Jordan
# on Friday 23 October 2009 20:29:
>I could use
>information about how to get a list (printout) of all installed
>applications.
If you installed them with aptitude, `dpkg -l | grep '^i'` or perhaps
`dpkg --get-selections` possibly informed by the dpkg manpage and/or
googling "debian list installed packages". For backup, I think the
sacred files holding this data are in /var/lib/dpkg/.
You can print this stuff on paper, but you could also feed it straight
into aptitude to keep it busy for a while once you've installed the
base packages. If you're crossing a release boundary, some of the
package names will have been changed to protect the innocent and new
stuff will have 2s and 3s tacked on it.
>I could also use a list of all configurations that I
> have made to Ubuntu, including a list of all repositories I have
> enabled. And I could use a list of a lot of other things needed to
> get me back where I am, things that I haven't even thought of yet.
Everything you've ever done as root to configure your system is in the
git history of your /etc/ directory iff you uses git to track changes
to your /etc/ directory. Otherwise, it's going to be hard to tell the
difference between what you changed and the defaults.
But even with a full history, upgrades often change the comments and
make a very noisy diff. There are also scripts that run when you
install a package (and sometimes those ask you questions about stuff)
so it's no simple matter to extract the difference between defaults and
decisions. You could diff your backup against the newly
installed /etc/, but that's likely to be a really big diff to read
through. Replacing the files after install is not a good idea because
the package configuration scripts would have made changes to deal with
options in the new versions and lots of stuff would probably break.
Your repositories should be in /etc/apt/sources.list
>I really don't want to do a reinstall, yet there is something messed up
>in Xorg, Gnome, or bluetooth on my Jaunty laptop.
It still might be simpler to fix that than to start over. Then setup
etckeeper or something so you have a record.
When I upgrade across releases, I use dist-upgrade, so everything
in /etc is intact and most of the packages carry-over your old
settings.
--Eric
--
"It works better if you plug it in!"
--Sattinger's Law
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