[Bug 424643] Re: fresh Ubuntu install marks all packages as manually installed

[Cefn]

I found a useful workaround for this bug, at least for my purposes
(adding and installing desktops cleanly).

You can start out (on a clean build) by marking everything as
automatically installed, then mark your choice of manual packages
afterward, checking that everything you want is retained as expected. In
my case it looked like this. To mark all current 'manually installed'
packages as automatic (don't leave your packages this way, else the next
apt-get autoremove will wipe your system) run the following command...

aptitude --display-format '%p' search '~i!~M' | xargs -n100 sudo apt-
mark auto

...and after a few iterations of...

sudo apt-get --simulate autoremove

...I verified I could use the following command to retain everything in
my Ubuntu Precise system which was installed at the time. The command
simply lists a few packages and metapackages to be set as manually
installed, causing everything else which they depend upon to be
retained.

sudo apt-mark manual ubuntu-desktop ubuntu-standard ubuntu-minimal
language-pack-en-base language-pack-gnome-en language-pack-gnome-en-base
libreoffice-help-en-gb thunderbird-locale-en-gb thunderbird-locale-en-us
libreoffice-gnome libidl0 liborbit2 linux-headers-generic-pae hyphen-en-
us installation-report linux-generic-pae mythes-en-au openoffice.org-
hyphenation libreoffice-l10n-en-za linux-firmware-nonfree ubuntu-
restricted-extras arduino geany gparted chromium-browser google-earth-
stable google-chrome-stable synaptic

This includes some elective packages which I had installed beyond the
ubuntu-desktop, (all the ones after libreoffice-l10n-en-za) and it may
be that there's a better 'dependency tree' than this, especially given
how many localisation packages seem to be explicitly set, but it's good
enough for me. I now recognise everything in the manually installed
status list  in Synaptic, and can work from here to the system I
explicitly want.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/424643

Title:
  fresh Ubuntu install marks all packages as manually installed

Status in “livecd-rootfs” package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  Binary package hint: synaptic

  After today update od synaptic a new state is displayed "installed (manual)" the packages displayed on this state are the same as in the "installed" state.
  Joined a screen capture.

  ProblemType: Bug
  Architecture: amd64
  Date: Sat Sep  5 02:08:54 2009
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
  ExecutablePath: /usr/sbin/synaptic
  NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
  Package: synaptic 0.62.7ubuntu3
  ProcEnviron:
   PATH=(custom, no user)
   LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8
   SHELL=/bin/bash
  ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-9.29-generic
  SourcePackage: synaptic
  Uname: Linux 2.6.31-9-generic x86_64

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