[UFO Chicago] "must have" packages

[Ian Bicking]

On Tue, 2002-11-05 at 11:26, Peter A. Peterson II wrote:
> Quoting Nick Moffitt:
> > 	It might be worthwhile to keep a metapackage handy and
> > maintained for the future.  I started doing this with zork, but lost
> > interest mostly because I knew I wouldn't use it.
> 
> Yeah -- it's the kind of thing that if you rebuild one box every 3
> years or something, it's a little heavy handed to have a
> metapackage... but then if you have to do it more often, or you're
> trying to get people or other servers up and running quick, something
> like a metapackage would be real handy...

You could do:

dpkg -l | grep ^ii | awk '{print $2}' > package-list.txt

Then restore the package with apt-get install `cat package-list.txt`. 
It's crude and very easy.  (I think there's some built in way to get the
package list for backup reasons anyway, without grep/awk, but I can't
remember the option).

  Ian