Recently I helped a friend migrate to Ubuntu and I helped him dual boot because he had some older games that only ran on Windows. (We tried for several hours to get them to run under Wine to no avail)
Well I was over at his house today and realized that he installed windows onto an older slower hard drive. He also wants to try a different distro of Ubuntu. So here is my question.
He's got alot of apps installed, and I really don't feel like going through and writing down every app he installed so I can sit here, and download each one individually. I'm sure this would take me hours, and we want to get back to gaming today.
Does anyone know of a way to have all of his INSTALLED apps that he installed into a text file through the terminal or a program that would help? And does anyone know how to install a group of applications at once? This also must include listing the dependencies, for list, and installation of dependencies.
I know its a two part question, but while he's gone fixing something at work today, I want to get it all done and surprise him. So timely responses, and clearly laid out instructions would be awesome.
As for installing multiple apps you can list all of the apps you want installed in a single line.
Example: Click the link and follow Alvars answer.
This will do them sequentially and not all at once, which is something that you did ask for. So it will install program1 them move on to program2 and so on and so forth.
If you feel insecure about clicking links here is the command.
yeah piece of cake. Open up the terminal and then you just list off the packages you want installed. For example, on debain based distros (ubuntu and ubuntu derivatives):
sudo apt install package1 package2 package3 -y
//the -y is to say "yes" to all the prompts you will get
You could then go so far as to write a shell script of this command and then just fill it with the stuff you need and save it for later use.
We'll call this script install-my-stuff.sh.
#!/bin/bash
PROGRAMS=Package1 Package2 Package3
#and so on
sudo apt install $PROGRAMS -y
end
After you've made it, chmod 755 install-my-stuff.sh and then it in terminal by typing ./install-my-stuff.sh.
apt installs depencies automatically, if they're missing it won't install the package unless you force it. You can forward the output of a command with the > param to a file.
$ apt list --installed > installed.txt
That list will have a bunch of additional packageinfo so you can use another command to print only the first word of each line in a file, and forward the output to a new file
Apparently failed, that message doesn't make sense to me, apt is a cli program no? Doubt it's apt-get, but you could try that instead of apt, if it won't work it's just gonna post an error. The file is in the home dir assuming you didn't cd (change directory)
I'm not too familiar with ubuntu, you can check out 'man apt' for info tho
Ubuntu mate is what is installed on my friends pc. But he's wanting to switch to something else. I think he's switching to a KDE distro. I'm waiting for him to text me to know what I'm putting in.
You should be able to google "how to move from Distro X to Distro Y" and come up with a tutorial. if it is from one Ubuntu distribution to another it's pretty simple.
I originally installed Ubuntu 16.04 I didn't like Unity and wanted to add in all the programs from Unbuntu Studio, so I followed a guide that I found online and moved without wiping my drives and reinstalling.
Yeah, unfortunately I'm also dual-booting and most likely it's gonna be on the same drive. Then I gotta have the /home folder be on a separate drive so he doesn't lose everything.
I know how to do that, more or less.
But I just wanted a simpler way to reinstall all his apps without having to go through each one, write down what he downloaded, and then one by one re-install everything he had.
I'm not a total noob when it comes to OS installs, but this was a bit more tricky. And it's compounded with the fact that I don't have a spare drive to work with to dump files to that is gonna make this even more interesting on how to do this all.
I'm planning on re-installing his Windows to his SSD, and then Installing Linux on the same drive and HOPEFULLY taking his home folder for Linux, and placing it on the old Windows drive.
I'm hoping so anyway. I just gotta find easy work arounds so that I don't take up so much time. Even though I know re-installing Windows will be the longest.
He just texted me with: "I want to switch to Kubuntu"
Well, that makes my job a WHOLE lot easier!
Kind of. I think.
Is there ANY major differences between Kubuntu and Ubuntu that he will notice besides the startup screen and login? Is there ANYTHING he might wanna use in it that will be missing?
Cause if not, I'm just installing KDE on this thing.
Also, is it possible to move the /home folder to another drive and then shrink the remaining root partition to fit windows?
Or would this be easier just to install Windows, THEN install Kubuntu and use apt-clone to get all his stupid aps?
Problem will be that there are quite a number of gtk apps that will work in KDE, but with some cutting corners, although KDE is pretty good at integrating them into the KDE environment... Kubuntu is just not so great at that, KDE Neon is much better at that for instance, and it's also Ubuntu based. Reality is that quite a number of gtk apps have a Qt pendant, that will offer more enjoyment in a KDE environment.
What I propose is that you screenshot the apps list, simple PrintScreen, so it stores the list in /home//Pictures, and then you change distros by doing a reinstall, without reformatting the /home partition. Then you take a look at the screenshots and install the corresponding apps, with synaptic it's pretty fast and painless anyway.