As a clean install of ubuntu is often the only reliable way to upgrade, it’s useful to know everything that you’ve installed manually. You could get a list of everything that’s marked in for installation with something like:
dpkg --get-selections | grep -v deinstall > my-selections
but that list tends to be very long and it includes all the dependencies. So if you install a meta package which depends on a specific version of some other package you’ll be trying to install that specific version after upgrade, which is not what we want. In that case all we want is the meta package.
Luckly, apt-get keeps a history of every time it is called. These history files are in /var/log/apt/history.log.(\d).gz. Each entry in that list contains a “Commandline: …” line which lists the command line that was executed. Thus we can get a list of everything we’ve installed by grepping through these files.
The first script is a perl script which parses “Commandline: …” entries:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 | #!/usr/bin/perl # parse_apt_log.pl while(<>) { if(/^Commandline: apt-get install(.+)/) { unless(/--reinstall/) { print join("\n", split(/\s+/, $1) ); } } } |
and the second is a bash script which pipes the contents of those history files to the perl script
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 | #!/bin/bash outfile="$(mktemp)" gunzip -c /var/log/apt/history.log.*.gz | ./parse_apt_log.pl > $outfile sort "$outfile" rm "$outfile" |
Which gives an output like:
josh@Nadie:~/Desktop$ ./make_pkg_list.sh astyle bitcoin-qt debathena-pharos-support dhex digikam docbook2x docbook5-xml docbook-xsl-ns firefox flip fontforge fop gdm git-svn gnucash gyp icedtea6-plugin icedtea-7-plugin jhead latexml libapache2-mod-fastcgi libavcodec-extra-53 libav-dbg libavdevice-extra-53 libavfilter-extra-2 libavformat-extra-53 libavutil-extra-51 libcairo2-dbg libcrypto++-dev libcurl4-gnutls-dev libfcgi-dev libgdal1-dev libglade2.0-cil libgnome-desktop-dev libgtkglext1-dev libjpeg-turbo-progs libjson0-dev libmosquitto0 libpcre3-dev libqtsysteminfo1 libtelepathy-qt4-2 libtidy-dev libusb-0.1-4 libusb-1.0-0-dev libusb-dev libxml2-dev libxml2-utils linux-generic markdown meld mtpfs mtp-tools network-manager-openvpn okular openjdk-7-jre owncloud-client pcsxr pcsxr pdfedit python-rosinstall qt-sdk qtsixa ragel ros-fuerte-desktop-full ros-fuerte-pr2-* ros-fuerte-pr2-simulator ros-fuerte-rqt rtmpdump sixad smplayer sound-juicer spawn-fcgi sqlitebrowser synapse ufraw ufraw-batch uncrustify universalindentgui untex vlc-dbg xdotool xmlstarlet xmlto xsltproc
You can reinstall this list on the new system with sudo apt-get install `tr '\n' ' ' < package-list.txt`, where tr will remove the newlines.
Other install notes for upgrading to ubuntu 13.04:
To install deb packages from the command line along with their dependencies install gdebi-core from the repositories. Then run, for instance sudo gdebi google-chrome-stable-current_amd64.deb.
To remove overlay scrollbars:
gsettings set com.canonical.desktop.interface scrollbar-mode normal
To allow rawdisk vmdk's in Virtualbox the user must be a member of the disk group:
sudo usermod -a -G disk user