Two questions - ghosting and package lists

[joeaverage]

Hello good Linux people!

 

I have a couple questions that are prob pretty simply for you advanced users.

 

I have a desktop Mandriva installtion and I want to move it to a new larger hard drive. What is the best way? I have the old hda where Mandriva is installed and I added hde (I think) last night. I want to copy my installation over to the new drive and then physically change the cables so it becomes hda. The old primary drive then gets formatted and becomes storage space.

 

Second question is: is there an easy way to get a list of software I have installed on my computer? I have my favorite software titles but sometimes one or two will get left out of a new install. One example is kmix. It just disappeared recently but I did not know what it was called. Maybe an upgrade removed it. Another was Kdiskfree. I think I could write a long command for the command line that would automatically install these packages on another computer right?

 

Simply "urpmi kmix win32 celestia" and so on?

 

Is there an easy way to get urpmi to look at a list of software and install it? '

 

Lastly - is there a simple text list of all the Linux software somewhere? I am thinking fondly of those Linux to Windows equivalency tables. Short and sweet with lots of links. What is the best one? Wikipedia has some good lists.

 

Thanks folks!!! :)

[aphelion]

You could most likely use something like CloneZilla to create an Image, and then restore that image to the new drive. I have used CloneZilla on a friends XP machine, to clone his C partition on a drive, then format the partition, then restore the image, worked brilliantly, fairly easy to follow.

 

http://www.clonezilla.org/

 

For the package lists, I'm unsure after the event how you would go about it, but during installation, just at the end before you eject the MDV CD/DVD, there is an option (maybe under Advanced or something) that allows you to save the package list, you could then use this on another installation. I have never actually used it, but I did select it to create the package list once just out of curiosity. Maybe just something to keep in mind for the next time you install.

[Greg2]

is there an easy way to get a list of software I have installed on my computer?

To make a list of all installed packages: In a terminal do

rpm -qa > ~/rpm-list.txt

To make a list that includes the package info, do

rpm -qai > ~/rpm-list.txt

[adamw]

For the first one, you can pipe it through 'sort' to get it in alphabetical order:

 

rpm -qa | sort > ~/rpm-list.txt

[theYinYeti]

I've done this using Gparted (using "System Rescue CD"):

- partition destination disk: same layout, different sizes,

- right-click » copy on source partition,

- right-click » paste on destination partition,

- and so on…

 

Or a carefull "copy" of all files using tar.

This latter method also works accross the network, the destination PC running sshd from a live CD :)

 

Yves.

[joeaverage]

Hey, thanks!