I recently got a new laptop (more on this in another post, perhaps). After I installed Debian Linux from scratch and copied my home directory over to it, I needed to install all the software I used on my old machine. Here’s one way to do this.<\/p>\n
On your old system, create a list of your installed packages:<\/p>\n
\r\ndpkg -l > old_packages\r\ncat old_packages | awk '{print $2}' | sort > old_packages_list\r\n<\/pre>\nCopy the file old_packages_list<\/code> to your new system. Then, on your new system, run:<\/p>\n\r\ndpkg -l > new_packages\r\ncat new_packages | awk '{print $2}' | sort > new_packages_list\r\ncomm -2 -3 old_packages_list new_packages_list > missing\r\n<\/pre>\nThe file missing<\/code> now contains a list of packages that existed on your old system that don’t exist on your new one.<\/p>\nIf you don’t work with many library packages directly, you can filter them out by reverse grepping for ones that begin with “lib”. (These are installed automatically as dependencies for other things; you don’t usually need to worry about them unless you need them for development.)<\/p>\n
\r\ncat missing | egrep -v \"^lib\" > missing_apps_only\r\n<\/pre>\nGoing through this list, I could quickly identify all the software I recognized and wanted to install, and skip packages no longer useful to me (programs to burn CDs and DVDs, for example, since my new machine doesn’t have a drive) or applications I only played with once or twice. And I didn’t install things I didn’t recognize—I can always install them later.<\/p>\n
This gets your new computer up and running in short order.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I recently got a new laptop (more on this in another post, perhaps). After I installed Debian Linux from scratch and copied my home directory over to it, I needed to install all the software I used on my old machine. Here’s one way to do this. On your old system, create a list of … Continue reading “Installing all the Software from an Old System”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-admin","category-linux"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/codefork.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/codefork.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/codefork.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/codefork.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/codefork.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=479"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/codefork.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":483,"href":"https:\/\/codefork.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479\/revisions\/483"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/codefork.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/codefork.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/codefork.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}