Deciding to upgrade to Ubuntu’s alpha-state Intrepid Ibex because of a hope that tiny bug might be fixed: not such a good idea. Deciding that, because your beautiful composite set-up was broken by the Ibex kernel upgrade that you should maybe try out the even-more-alpha intrepid-proposed repository: frankly ill-advised. Struggling with the consequential collapse of all your wireless networking by attempting to remove and re-install dbus from the old Ubuntu: not so much asking for trouble, as drawing a pentagram in your own mother’s blood and hollering in Aramaic for same. So I was without a working laptop for much of today.
Well, as I’ve heard people say in the same circumstances, at least it was a good test of my backup policy. In the end I just threw up my arms, re-installed from an old Ubuntu Huffin’ Heron, and pulled my home directory off the backup drive.
Of course, the painful bit with re-animating an old and familiar set-up is trying to recall all the tiny mods and tweaks that one gave one’s system back in the ice age, then re-implementing them individually on the new system — all without saddling it all with your later, senile wanderings.
I actually do backup my /etc folder, so it wasn’t that bad — Debian is pretty good at keeping most of the configuration files in etc, on pain of maintainer death. But I hadn’t kept a list of the many extra packages I’d installed. Fortunately, Debian/Ubuntu machines, positively trembling with racial knowledge of how badly its users screw up in the past, keep their own backup copies of this list, in /var/backups/dpkg.status.0 .
If you’re ever in the position of checking this list with your current system to try and work out what packages you should install to get to your old state, try package_list. You feed it the dpkg.status backup file as a command line argument, and it spits out the packages you need to install.
Here’s some of what it spat at me. I’m off to see Eddie Izzard now — when I get back, I’ll highlight some of my favourite Ubuntu packages here:
Hello, I am back. I don’t know whether your RSS reader will notice this, but here are my all new summaries of my dpkg list.
These are ones that I snuffled from other, non-official Ubuntu repositories. The SHAME!
- amazonmp3
- Amazon is a popular book-selling merchant and music distributor. They have a Debian friendly MP3 downloader.
- avant-window-navigator-bzr
- Avant is in no way a fake MacOS dock applet.
- chandler
- I tried Chandler for a bit, but now I am all about the Kontact
- ec2-ami-tools
- Amazon is a popular book-selling merchant and music distributor and virtual machine rental site
- isight-firmware-tools
- Yes, I run Ubuntu on a Macbook. Somewhere, Steve Jobs is screaming
- skype
- And I use proprietary software, so that’s Stallman screaming back.
- adblock-plus
- Who knew you could install Firefox plugins using the Ubuntu package system? Me, clearly, at some point.
- alien
- Alien lets you convert Redhat RPMs into
DebianUbuntu deb packages. Useful! - apache2
- If MacOS laptop owners can run apache locally, then so can I.
- apg
- More useful! APG is an obscurely named password-generating utility.
- avahi-utils
- Avahi is the Linux name for Apple’s Bonjour which was the name for Apple’s Rendezvous which was the name for the Internet’s Zeroconf.
- blogtk
- When somebody says “What can I use instead of Ecto on Linux”, tell them about BloGTK. Then hope they don’t ask any more questions, because it’s not really that polished.
- cheese
- This is like Photobooth. Not quite as polished, but quite as useless.
- compizconfig-settings-manager
- This is, by contrast, awesome and lets you turn your poor user-interface into the most tweaked, weird, and customized cube-spinning zoomey wibble-wibble monster imaginable. Makes everyone sick with jealousy. Or vertigo, hard to say.
- dillo
- Dillo is the rude-sounding super-minimal super-fast browser. Good for checking what your site looks like to Victorians.
- discover1
- This is discover1, of course.
- dovecot-imapd
- Dovecot is about as sane an IMAP server as you can muster.
- gammu
- gnokii
- gnome-phone-manager
- gnome-vfs-obexftp
- These are all for talking to my Nokia phone, and pulling addresses off it, and sending it SMSs and kissing it and hugging it.
- gnumeric
- I have a soft spot for Gnumeric, which was Gnome’s competitor to Excel, and yet has somehow managed to not become as crazy-ass as Evolution (or OpenOffice, for that matter).
- gsynaptics
- If you have a Macbook, and you run Linux, this lets you set up your trackpad just the way you like it. Sixty hours later.
- hfsplus
- If you have a Macbook, and you run Linux, and secretly keep MacOS on it because you’re not entirely crazy, this gives you some utilities to look at them.
- idle
- Idle is the standard Python editor. It’s sort of funky.
- imagemagick
- Imagemagick is actually what you need to do all that graphical image conversion.
- iodine
- This is that program that lets you tunnel IP over DNS, like in Little Brother. The technique was popularised by Dan Kaminsky, who later went on to save the world.
- kontact
- Even though I use Gnome, Kontact rules my world. I live with the pain of all the background KDE libraries coming in and spilling their strong German beer everywhere.
- lynx
- Lynx is the text web browser. It’s useful for “lynx -dump http://thiswebpageinasemblenceofatextfile.com/”
- midori
- Midori is another lightweight browser. It’s useful for when you are tired of only having seven other browsers.
- miredo
- Miredo gives you IPv6 when other people only give you IPv4. Useful for … well, it’ll be useful one day.
- miro
- Miro is the new name for Democracy, which has been less popular ever since Iraq.
- mnemosyne
- I forget. Oh wait, it’s a flashcard memory aid!
- mozilla-firefox-locale-en-gb
- What can I say? I miss the old country.
- mysql-admin
- mysql-client
- mysql-navigator
- mysql-server
- ndisgtk
- Do you know how long I’ve been scared of relational databases?
- nmap
- For portscanning the hell out of strange networks and broken machines.
- ntop
- For working out who the hell is using all the bandwidth on your network.
- oolite
- GPL’d Elite! For Linux! And MacOS! And SGI Irix!
- pandoc
- Incredibly useful for converting to and from various markup languages, like HTML, Markdown, RTF, etc. Written in Haskell for extra cred points.
- pdftk
- For doing hideous things to PDF files.
- pidgin-libnotify
- For actually telling me when someone is trying to get my attention on IM.
- pommed
- Handles Macbook hotkeys. From the really useful, somewhat obscure Mac support Ubuntu repository.
- powertop
- Use fewer watts!
- privoxy
- Part of my tor setup, natch.
- pylint
- Horrifically pedantic code style checker.
- python-beautifulsoup
- Leonard’s damn fine, damn tolerant HTML parser.
- python-feedparser
- Mark’s damn fine, damn tolerant RSS/Atom parser.
- python-mechanize
- When you want to webscrape like a pro.
- python-nose
- Python unit tests handled gently and kindly.
- rtorrent
- The best of the background, text-based torrent handlers.
- sc
- The ‘vi’ of spreadsheets. Really.
- sox
- The ImageMagick of sound files.
- squeak
- For wasting TOO MUCH TIME in happy Smalltalk land.
- squeak-plugin
- sshfs
- Mount remote systems using just ssh.
- swftools
- For messing around with Flash files (like extracting images, etc).
- terminator
- Multiple terminal windows in the same (Python-coded) window.
- tidy
- Cleans up your (or someone else’s) HTML.
- tor
- For anonymity and censorship circumvention.
- torbutton-extension
- trickle
- A command line program that will throttle and bandwidth limit almost any other command line program
- vlc
- For when mplayer won’t cut it.
- vrms
- Virtual RMS — for nagging you about those non-free programs (see above).
- wammu
- The graphical bit of gammu, the cellphone software.
- wine
- For running Windows programs.
- wireshark
- For monitoring your Net traffic (and pointing out to others how easy it is to monitor theirs).
Here are the official Ubuntu packages.
Phew!