Ubuntu – How to find manually installed packages

apt

I installed a plain Ubuntu 10.10 on my computer and installed some software via apt-get. Last week I managed to break everything and just started from scratch, and I need to reinstall my software. Is there some way to create a list with all the packages that I have installed manually?

So that it would give me a list like texlive, ... and not texlive, texlive-dep1, textlive-dep2, ... and all the standard packages removed?

If I could somehow figure out which programs out of the regular install I have removed, that would be awesome too!

Update 2015-05-23: I now use Ansible as configuration management on my systems. There I specify the packages to install. This serves the goal, installing all the programs on a fresh system, even better. So this question might be the entry into some light configuration management.

Best Answer

With this suggestion, I'm assuming your old installation will still boot!

To replicate one set of packages on another machine:

On System A, run:

dpkg --get-selections | grep -v deinstall > my-selections

Move the my-selections file over to System B.

On System B, run:

dpkg --set-selections < my-selections

and then:

sudo apt-get dselect-upgrade

Important note: if you have installed packages from non-standard repositories and/or PPAs, you will also want to copy /etc/apt/sources.list and the contents of /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ from System A to System B before you run the upgrade.

You can use dpkg to see what you've removed as well (NB: this will also include packages that you manually installed and removed):

dpkg --get-selections | grep deinstall

You can see your results in the terminal, or, of course, redirect to a file.

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