Comments on: Clone Your Ubuntu installation

By: pete

pete — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 13:10:00 +0000

This is a handy first step in cloning a system.
Don’t forget, you’ll still have to copy across users/passwords, hosts, users profiles, their home directories, email, log files, any and all config data your packages may need and probably a ton of other stuff I’ve forgotten.
This is far from a one-line machine cloning solution

By: szandor

szandor — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 08:54:30 +0000

#mondoarchive -Oi -9 -p m1330-image -d /storage/mondo/ISO -S /storage/mondo -E “/storage” -s 4300m

this saves your entire hard drive (lvm supported) to a dvd as a bootable iso image. just use k3b or whatever to burn it. just make sure you create /storage/mondo/ISO and that you grab the 2.2.6 version of mondo and mindi from mondo rescue, not the repos. now you have a bootable dvd. i do this for all my laptops when i want to get crazy so i can just reimage my laptop rather than undoing all my changes.

By: El

El — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 20:25:57 +0000

Rjack, your thought was incomplete…

dpkg --get-selections | awk '$2 ~ /^install$/ {print $1}'

By: El

El — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 20:03:24 +0000

I saw these commands on another site.

Remember:
dpkg -l | grep ii | awk ‘print $2′ > remember_these_debs.txt

Reinstall:
sudo apt-get install `cat remember_these_debs.txt`

By: sid

sid — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 13:23:02 +0000

Thanks Nelson. worked like a charm.

By: Nelson

Nelson — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 20:19:50 +0000

If you want to export your applications to a pc without access to the internet, Just make an apt on cd.

In the first pc (the one with internet) type:
sudo apt-get install aptoncd

then run the program, burn a cd with the apt and remember to configure the other pc to read repositories from the cd instead of the net.

By: braddcadd

braddcadd — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 18:50:49 +0000

Can I do this and copy my home directory to the new computer? I am trying to get data, configurations, and everything. I can’t use partimage or anything else because I have a single broken package that has killed dpkg.

By: JohnnyColonic

JohnnyColonic — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 14:08:09 +0000

If you replace the install command with this:

xargs -a installedpackages sudo aptitude install

you won’t have to jimmy it past the abort with the -y option.

By: Trevor

Trevor — Sun, 20 May 2007 19:57:08 +0000

A had to include a -y switch on the second command to get it to work:
cat installedpackages | xargs sudo aptitude install -y

By: rjack

rjack — Sat, 19 May 2007 12:01:34 +0000

A simpler command can be

dpkg --get-selections | awk '/\

Sudo is not needed when you generate the list, nor grep. Awk prints the first field of every line that contains the word "install" on its own (\

By: Andy

Andy — Thu, 10 May 2007 17:45:03 +0000

This just saves a list, so you’d need internet.
I am not sure but i think you could get the deb packages.

By: Robert Crowe

Robert Crowe — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 00:07:49 +0000

Does this copy the packages or just makes a list for apt to go off of. I have a desktop with no way to access a network and a laptop with wireless and obvious mobility advantages. Is it possible to clone my installed packages off my laptop onto desktop with this method?

By: Øyvind Lein

Øyvind Lein — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 13:17:05 +0000

Your little snippet didn’t work for me, unless I removed the “equals”-sign.

….install$
=instead of this:=
….install$=

So:
sudo dpkg –get-selections | grep ‘[[:space:]]install$’| awk ‘{print $1}’ > installedpackages

By: Sami Haahtinen

Sami Haahtinen — Sun, 31 Dec 2006 19:32:08 +0000

The rest of that got left out.. Lets try it again:

dpkg –get-selections > mypackages.txt
sudo dpkg –set-selections < mypackages.txt
sudo apt-get dselect-upgrade

By: Sami Haahtinen

Sami Haahtinen — Sun, 31 Dec 2006 18:57:43 +0000

I kind of prefer this instead:

dpkg –get-selections > mypackages.txt
sudo dpkg –set-selections