Comments (25)

1. July 23, 2008
   Thomas Higgins

   Very informative, well written….you have been bookmarked.

   Cheers,
   Thomas

2. September 29, 2008
   KiwiDon

   Just joined and have a lot to learn.
   I think I’ve picked the right place. Cheers KiwiDon.

3. November 30, 2008
   Glen Wolters

   I cannot get sound, or printer, capability, from desktop computer, since Windows Vista had been installed. How can this problem be corrected?

4. November 30, 2008
   jd2066

   @Glen Wolters: It’s possible you need drivers for those things. Post your question on the forums along with your computer’s make and model number, printer make and model number and we will try to help you find drivers to fix those things.

5. December 10, 2008
   fastbullet

   Right you are that the complete list long. In fact, mine was well beyoun a single page.

   What is odd is that I could only scroll through the list from the end up through part of the lib*, but no farther. I really wanted to review what all was already installed. But I hit a brick wall.

   Can anyone tell me why this would be?

   I imagine that if I experiment with pipe-grep-letter -* I may be able to see alphabetic lists…

6. December 15, 2008

   fastbullet, its not elegant but in a pinch you can redirect anything to a file. (Use greater than > redirect parm)

   dpkg –get-selection > dkpg-get.txt

   That will give you a text file that you can view.

   You are probably aware of adding the | (pipe) more options on any command, granted that will not let you scroll back and forth.

   dpkg –get-selection | more – no scrolling, but you can see everything from beginning to end.

   You will quickly want to learn about grep and awk…just search the terms for plenty of helps. Using grep I can search for any lines that contain a string of characters, for instance if I wanted to find all instances of open* (openssh and openoffice.org3 come to mind and you will probably have a few more). The command with grep would look as follows:

   dpkg –get-selection | grep open*

   That should get you going and give you some additional terms to search for and use. You can get by with grep, but if you really want to do allot, learn shell scripting (bash (Borne shell) and korn (Korn shell) are the most popular, csh (C shell) is another good one, rarely used except by old school system administrators. Ultimately if you really want to manipulate the output of your commands you will want to learn AWK.

   Welcome to GNU/Linux and enjoy the journey, I know you will!

7. December 16, 2008
   1fastbullet

   Endless thanks !!

8. January 8, 2009
   max

   On the same topic, copying packages from one machine to another:

   On source machine:
   dpkg –get-selection | grep -v deinstall > dkpg-get.txt

   On target machine:
   dpkg –clear-selections
   dpkg –set-selections

9. January 8, 2009
   max

   Ooops, it had to be:

   #source machine:
   dpkg –get-selection | grep -v deinstall > dkpg-get.txt

   #target machine:
   dpkg –clear-selections
   dpkg –set-selections
   apt-get dselect-upgrade

   (You may need to copy /etc/apt/sources.list from source machine to target to let apt-get to download the packages beforehand)

10. January 8, 2009
    max

    dpkg –set-selections

11. January 8, 2009
    max

    It looks like forum has problems with the firefox?

    dpkg –set-selections

12. January 8, 2009
    max

    .. The ‘less’ sign and the text after it got cut, I’ll rephrase:

    cat dkpg-get.txt | dpkg –set-selections

13. April 2, 2009
    Sam

    Cheers body,

    it was very useful :-)

14. April 18, 2009
    Sjowhan

    Cheers! Was searching for this helpful document!

15. August 7, 2009
    niwat

    Oh ! very useful, and thank you very much.

16. September 9, 2009
    Bimzee

    very useful and thanks a lot geeks

17. September 15, 2009
    Donald

    Is there a way to expand this to get package descriptions as well? I know that /lib/dpkg/available has a list of all available packages from the last apt-get update with their descriptions. I want to figure out a way to generate a document showing which new packages have been added along with their descriptions to document what has changed on my system. (lenny 5.0.2).

18. September 29, 2009
    T-Bob

    I thought there was a way to (somehow!) list only the non-default packages – i.e. the ones added after an initial install. Any clues?

19. November 25, 2009
    Johnny

    @Donald:

    to get package descriptions as well use dpkg-query which will gives name,version,description by default but can be customized using dpkg-query -f to show all kinds of things, see man dpkg-query

20. December 22, 2009
    frenzy

    You can also use:

    dpkg -l
    or
    dpkg –list
    or
    dpkg-query -l
    or
    dpkg-query –list

    This is useful to get more informations about installed packages.

21. April 14, 2010
    Bryce

    You know, this article is over two years old, and yet its still useful. I needed this information today for a project. Thanks for writing it!

22. October 27, 2010
    ajaykumar

    Thank you very much to all!

23. December 31, 2010
    ahiayibor

    Thanks-a-lot. and keep up the good work.

24. July 11, 2011
    Musa

    Hello All,

    Could anybody kindly tell me how to upgrade a particular installed software?
    for instance, i have installed HAproxy (version 1.3) on ubuntu 10.04 and now i want to upgrade it to version 1.4.
    i have installed HAproxy using terminal command ‘apt-get install haproxy’

    any help here please?

    Regards

25. August 30, 2011
    Nitesh

    thanks frenzy you can also try
    ls -f
    ls -a