Comments on: Clone Your Ubuntu installation

By: Erik Vandamme

Erik Vandamme — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 11:05:49 +0000

I get errors running any of the:
dpkg –get-selections | grep install | awk -F” ” ‘{print $1}’ > pkg_fil
Ubuntu Intrepid 8.10, trying to store system before upgrade to 9.10

By: Daeng Bo

Daeng Bo — Sun, 25 May 2008 14:41:22 +0000

sudo dpkg –get-selections > packages.txt
sudo dpkg –set-selections < packages.txt ## The less-than sign got eaten before, along with everything after it.
sudo apt-get dselect-upgrade

That system works well and is easy to use. No regexp required.

By: Nimo

Nimo — Mon, 14 May 2007 13:31:45 +0000

Hi,

that sounds good, I was looking for something like that, but as a real basic user, I’d have two questions :
1 – what if we have uninstalled something from the vanilla ubuntu installation ? Will it get uninstalled as well with these scripts ? Or just ignored by the script and therefore left on the target system ?
2 – I see several scripts here above, in the article and the comments, all Chinese to me. I’m good only at copy-pasting, is there one that you gurus agree is better than the others ? (as in, more robust ?)

many thanks in advance, cheers

By: Luis Morales

Luis Morales — Sat, 12 May 2007 20:14:00 +0000

I use the scripts and have some troubles, but the idea is great to clonning ubuntu instalations. So, i use this scripts as root user and work fine:

Extract the packages:
dpkg –get-selections | grep install | awk -F” ” ‘{print $1}’ > pkg_files

To install:
cat pkg_files | xargs apt-get install -y

regards,

By: polarizer

polarizer — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 14:45:13 +0000

Sound easy to me. Thx you fpr sharing this. I’ll give it a try.

polarizers 2 cents

By: Chuck Tellechea

Chuck Tellechea — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 08:05:14 +0000

I don’t know why but this, from above, did not work for me:
sudo dpkg –get-selections | grep ‘[[:space:]]install$=’| awk ‘{print $1}’ > installedpackages

However, this worked great:
sudo dpkg –get-selections | perl -e ‘@lines = ;foreach(@lines){ $_ =~ m/(^[a-z,A-Z,0-9,-_]+)\s+.*/;print “$1\n”;}’ > installedpackages

By: GermanyZulu

GermanyZulu — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 22:28:54 +0000

(QUOTE)
What about using a more simple approach?

sudo dpkg –get-selections > packages.txt

Copy packages.txt to the remote machine and do:

sudo dpkg –set-selections
(/QUOTE)

It took me a while to find the answer to this but the last step of this process is:

sudo apt-get dselect-upgrade

-GZ

By: Excds

Excds — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 10:11:39 +0000

What about using a more simple approach?

sudo dpkg –get-selections > packages.txt

Copy packages.txt to the remote machine and do:

sudo dpkg –set-selections

By: Sam

Sam — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 09:09:27 +0000

Not an expert with regular expressions but found that grep ‘[[:space:]]install$=’ worked when the ‘=’ was removed.

Very useful article though

Thanks