Fwd: cloning a desktop to a notebook

[jsmith at alum.mit.edu]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: jsmith at alum.mit.edu <jsmith at alum.mit.edu>
Date: Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 6:23 AM
Subject: Re: cloning a desktop to a notebook
To: Neil Joseph Schelly <neil at jenandneil.com>




On Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 6:14 AM, Neil Joseph Schelly <neil at jenandneil.com>wrote:

> On Tuesday 26 August 2008 15:36, Greg Rundlett wrote:
> > I *assumed* that apt-get had a -f option to designate a file to read
> > package names from.... it does not.  So, a working equivalent to what
> > I intended to have happen would be
> >  sudo apt-get install `cat package-list.txt`
>
> Yeah, apt-get -f means something else entirely.  But this is what xargs is
> all
> about.
>
> cat package-list.txt|xargs apt-get install
>
> That still assumes your package list is clean.  This is how I'd make it
> (need
> apt-show-versions installed).  It still won't make a perfectly clean list,
> but clean enough.  I have duplicated many system setups just like this.
> apt-show-versions |cut -f1 -d'/'
>
> the way I use is with  dpkg -
"dpkg --get-selections > packages.txt"

move packages.txt over to the new machine, then:
"sudo dpkg --set-selections <packages.txt && apt-get -f install" will
install them all.

You can edit the packages.txt to remove any packages you don't want
installed (say you had nvidia on the desktop, but ATI on the laptop - you
could hand-edit the packages.txt to remove the nvidia, then install the ATI
package).

I've used this several times to clone machines.

jeff

-------------------------------------------------------------
Forgot to send to the distro list, plus one edit:
"sudo dpkg --set-selections <packages.txt && apt-get -f install" should be
""sudo dpkg --set-selections <packages.txt && sudo apt-get -f install"

jeff
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/private/gnhlug-discuss/attachments/20080827/cec0878f/attachment.html