Clearly I don't want to lose all that I've built up over the past year or so on this machine, but I have decided that I want to do a clean install. There are a number of reasons for this, the main one is that I haven't done so yet on this machine, and this Lucid is an LTS. Not that this means that I won't upgrade again in November, but it does provide an extra impetus to do it. The upshot here is that I'm going to need to generate a backup of my settings etc. so that I can restore them in Lucid.
User files
Thankfully my /home directory is in fact another partition, which makes it easier to keep, and provides a nearby backup location for all the other files that I've modified that don't live there.Installed packages:
Thankfully apt remembers which packages the user installed, and which were installed as dependencies. Thus, after much forum searching, I've come up with the following line to grab all the manually installed packages:
aptitude search '~i!~E' | grep -v "i A" | cut -d " " -f 4 | sort | uniq > manual
This searches for all installed (~i) not-Essential (!~E) packaages, removing (-v) those that were installed automatically ("i A"). The descriptions are then removed (cut) and the list sorted and made unique. Since this is quite a big list (and I want to keep it so I can install them back) I threw this into a file.
I plan to run the same line in the new install, and then just ignore any packages already there. I'll probably take the opportunity to re-evaluate what I have installed too.
