Pre-emptive Request: Backing up installed packages.

[Bob Nielsen]

On Jan 25, 2006, at 10:43 PM, Michael T. Richter wrote:

> I'm getting the distinct impression that I'm going to have to  
> resort to
> backing up /home and reinstalling Ubuntu to get access to my audio
> hardware again.  The problem is that I've downloaded and installed an
> obscene number of packages from Synaptic.  (It's really quite  
> addictive,
> isn't it?)  Is there any convenient way to automate getting a list of
> packages that have been installed placed on a file somewhere and then
> automagically reinstalling them without having to select them one  
> by one
> through Synaptic?  (And, too, a convenient way to backup the  
> repository
> information?)

In addition to the other suggestions, if you haven't cleaned out your  
cache of downloaded packages they will be in /var/cache/apt and you  
can back these up to avoid downloading them again.

Tip: If you have /home on a separate partition, you will be able to  
reinstall without affecting its contents.  I also did this with /usr/ 
local, which I use to store self-compiled programs and some archival  
data.