Ubuntu: Transfer Your Applications To A New Machine

So you have that brand new PC still shiny and in all glorious state. You're eager to start using the new computer, but all your files and applications are in the old computer. Copying files is easy since the days of external drives, or for geeks, days of networking. But what about those applications you spend years installing and filtering so that the set of programs in your PC is exactly the way you like it. Is there an easier way than manually listing down every installed program in the old computer, then installing them one-by-one on the shiny new machine?

If you're using Ubuntu (or most other Linux distros), the answer is YES.

Three steps:

1) Make a list of installed applications in the old machine

dpkg --get-selections | tee installed_packages


2) Make the applications for installation in the new machine

sudo dpkg --set-selections < ./installed_packages


3) Install them!

sudo apt-get -u dselect-upgrade

Posted by Posted by Ariff Abdullah , on at 08:01 • Labels: geek, L, linux, ubuntu