iNode: Nota Bene

I've just installed Ubuntu 9.10 on my desktop machine (laptop). I have /home in a separate partition, so my usual habit is to destroy the old OS and install afresh. Most applications manage to do the right thing when they see my $HOME, as long as I keep the same uid.

Of course, before you do this, it's great to preserve a list of the extras that you had installed … dpkg will list them, but it formats the output for a tty even when being piped, so you have to trick it with the COLUMNS envariable to get full package names …

    $ COLUMNS=200 dpkg -l > ~/9.04.dpkg.list

Anyway, once the new OS is installed & running, grab the equivalent list and compare the two … we're interested in seeing any package that was in the 9.04 list that isn't in the 9.10 list …

    $ COLUMNS=200 dpkg -l > ~/9.10.dpkg.list
    $ for i in $(tail -n +6 9.04.dpkg.list | awk '{print $2}')
    > do
    > grep " $i " 9.10.dpkg.list >/dev/null || echo $i
    > done > 9.10.notin

That was 1009 packages on my machine, so I has a quick look through by eye and identified the best ones … many were libraries, so they could all be ignored. I got it down to 75 entries pretty quick. I edited 9.10.notin and deleted every line with an un-necessary entry, and then …

    $ sudo aptitude install $(cat 9.10.notin)

This makes sure that I don't forget about supertuxkart!

Announcing the first meeting of the Dunedin Skeptics in the Pub!

Come along over to The Duke of Wellington at 7.30pm on Wednesday 28 Oct to meet us all … http://dunedin.skepticsinthepub.net.nz/calendar/11698693/

Richard Stallman has recently conducted another interview with Kim Hill on Radio New Zealand; and once again I've produced a transcript – see /articles/rmsrnz2/index.html.