Simple answer to "what's in your universe?"

[Lex Hider]

Hi,

Having looked at the original "what's in your universe?" thread
mentioned in Ubuntu Traffic #6:
http://people.ubuntulinux.org/~mako/ubuntu-traffic/u20041001_06.html#3

I think having hard data like this would be a great way on deciding on
which packages could be integrated into Supported for Hoary and future
releases. Perhaps Ubuntu could have it's own popularity contest.

Here are some tips that use that great app: aptitude.

I actually have an alias in ~/.bashrc of:

alias PackSearch='aptitude -F "%p" search'

that give me info on the archives and what I have installed. You will
need to surround it's argument with single quotes '~examplesearchstring'
so that the shell does take things like !.

To list all installed packages from universe:
PackSearch '~i~suniverse'

To list all installed packages from universe that *I* installed and not
the dependencies:
PackSearch '~i~suniverse!~M'

What kernel are you running?
PackSearch '^linux-image~i'

So here's a real handy way of setting up a new Debian/Ubuntu machine.
On the already setup machine do:
PackSearch '~i!~M' > MyPacks.txt
Then when setting up a new machine or re-installing:
sudo aptitude install `cat MyPacks.txt` to clone the installed packages
of the last machine.

Due to the handy metapackages ubuntu-base & ubuntu-desktop the list of
installed packs will most likely be quite small.
PackSearch '~i!~M' | wc
gives 26 packages which includes stuff like grub, linux-image-FOO, etc.

And finally, how about a simple step to get an install of fairly
standard utilities [e.g. gcc, gdb, less!, sudo, ftp, make, perl, python,
etc.]

sudo aptitude install `PackSearch '~E|~prequired|~pimportant|~pstandard'
This is more of a Debian tip than an Ubuntu one.

Lex.

PS - Sorry, but I don't have list archives and I am a new subscriber so
couldn't reply to original thread.

PPS - Please see /usr/share/doc/aptitude/README and head to SEARCHING
section for info on the various ~ search options.