[sclug] cloning a debian installation

[Roland Turner SCLUG]

On Mon, 2006-03-13 at 10:53 +0000, John Stumbles wrote:

> It looks as if dpkg-query -l will give me a list of currently installed 
> packages, and I suppose I could throw these all at apt-get but I can see 
> soem problems with this such as the package names in dpkg-query being 
> truncated and installation resulting in a lot of hiatuses (hiati?) as 
> various packages stop and prompt for various configuration parameters. 
> Surely there's some neat way to do this?

dpkg --(get|set)-selections

> Also, I assume I can save download time if I put all my 
> /var/cache/apt/archives files on a dvd or something local that the new 
> install can read rather than get from the network. Is there a particular 
> format to save the files in to make them available to the installation 
> process?

I prefer to simply use an HTTP cache (or, more recently, a local copy of
the install DVDs), having spent too many hours trying to placate APT,
but yes, if you haven't been cleaning your cache out, simply copying the
contents of /(etc|var/cache|var/lib)/apt across verbatim should help.

- Raz