apt-get system reinstallation

[NoOp]

On 07/09/2008 12:44 PM, NoOp wrote:

> 
> I took the list of packages that 'aptitude reinstall ~i' spit out, put
> them into Writer in OOo, removed all of the double spaces &
> end-paragraph markers, put sudo apt-get install --reinstall on the front
> and pasted the whole thing into a terminal. It currently says that I
> have 1190 for reinstalland need to get 648MB of archives, I hit yes, and
> off it goes...
> 
> 

Well that was interesting... all 1190 packages (6548MB) fetched and
reinstalled just fine with the exception of the:

E: Couldn't configure pre-depend coreutils for debianutils, probably a
dependency cycle.

Maybe it has to be swapped so that debianutils comes first in the
command string.

So it doesn't look like that method breaks anything (so far). I don't
think that will help with Bart's Fx3/Flash issues but it's an
interesting "apt-get system reinstallation" excercise. Sundar's method
only installs missing packages from the list (using dselect) so that
doesn't reinstall them if you already have them on the system. dpkg
--get-selections | grep -v deinstall > ubuntu-files does however create
a complete list that could be modified similar to what I did with the
aptitude reinstall ~i output though.