Making GNOME happy when you migrate data
July 6, 2008 by Clair Ching
Filed under How To, Migration, laptops
Here’s an awesome tip I got today:
On the old computer, run dpkg –get-selections >> packages.list. Get the new computer online and install dselect (yeah, it’s not part of dpkg anymore). Copy the packages.list to your new computer. Then run sudo dpkg –set-selections < < packages.list. Finally, run sudo dselect and choose Install. (Oh the fun of migrating data)
Thanks, Ubuntu Linux tips and tricks! I often forget what other software I install apart from the defaults and my usual ones, this is especially true for the apps that I installed for the heck of it or for other people. I’ve had problems about configuration files complaining to me about not finding files or the app, etc. This would solve it! But, folks, please note that this tip only works for those that came from the repos, not the ones that you just downloaded over the internet or installed from source. So it’s still better to note those other things, ok?
I wish I knew about this earlier. It surely would have saved me from headaches of trying to remember things I installed or not having an application I need. (This is especially bad when I have limited or no internet access.)
If you have other similar tips when migrating data, please feel free to share them here! 
You may want to remove that extra space within “dpkg –set-selections < < packages.list”, I’m not sure but it will probably not work anymore with that space.
Greetings, Jonas
Thanks for spotting that, Jonas
I will edit that.
If you run “dpkg -l | grep -^i | grep -v ^ii” you’ll get a listing of all packages that are marked for install but aren’t *actually* installed. That’d be the list of things you installed from not-the-repos.
ah! “dpkg -l | grep ^i | grep -v ^ii”
There was an extra – in there. Oh, and the -l is a minus little-L