File listing all the manually installed packages?

[Bill Mills-Curran]

On Fri, May 09, 2014 at 02:55:52PM +0100, Adam Funk wrote:
> 
> Is there a file on an Ubuntu system that I can grep to find all the
> manually installed packages?
> 
> Normally I'd expect grep the output of dpkg or aptitude for this sort
> of thing, but the machine in question died; I copied the entire hard
> drive onto a USB drive & need the information to make sure I reinstall
> Ubuntu (for someone else) on the new machine without anything missing.
> 
> Thanks,
> Adam

Have you tried the --admindir option on dpgk-query?  The man page
suggests (to me, anyway) that you could access the db from the old
disk.

       --admindir=dir
              Change the location of the dpkg database. The  default
              location
              is /var/lib/dpkg.

Bill