After recently ending my three year love affair with Gentoo, I moved to Ubuntu when I found Mint, an Ubuntu based distribution that comes preloaded with all the codecs necesary to enjoy multimedia as well as some other tweaks. Debian’s dpkg/apt package manager is by far the best in the biz (yes, even better than portage), but I had stayed away from Ubuntu because 1) it’s so popular 2) I hate that damn brown theme and 3) it took me a half day of “apt-get install” -ing just to play a damn mp3 file. I understand why but please don’t drag me down into your ideology war RMS.

With Mint, it’s just install and play! That being said, you’ll still need to install some stuff like smbfs (to mount your NAS smb shares), nmap, sshfs, etc, but once you’ve got it absolutely perfect, you can clone it easily.

While doing some research for this post, I found some crazy ass 50 line awk scrtipts and choked on my Mountain Dew more than once. I’ve got a better method and no, this doesn’t involve the use of dd (which I’m thinking of writing a lengthly post on since I have some time). The idea here is just to export all of the packages I currently have into a text file and then use dpkg to install those on any other debian based machine.

Run this to ask dpkg to export all of your installed packages into a text list:

sudo dpkg --get-selections > installed_packages.txt


On the new machine, copy installed packages.txt to / and use dpkg to import and have apt-get install these packages (after you’ve run apt-get update and apt-get upgrade of course):

sudo dpkg --set-selections < installed_packages.txt


Then do apt-get update and apt-get upgrade and you're done!

(Source: Knoppix Wiki)