apt-get system reinstallation

[sktsee]

On Wed, 09 Jul 2008 09:06:19 -0400, Bart Silverstrim wrote:

> Is there a simple way to try a "reinstall" of everything currently
> installed on my system?
> 
> I have 2 Ubuntu 8.04 systems, one where youtube videos crash Firefox
> constantly (flash problem?) and the other doesn't seem have trouble
> playing flash videos. So while the latest Firefox and flash plugins from
> the repos may have troubles, it may be a combination problem of some
> kind on the one that is causing issues?
> 
> I didn't know if there was a simple way to try an in-place reinstall of
> software to see if it was a linking or dependancy issue that could be
> causing flash videos to keel over on the one system.

"sudo aptitude reinstall ~i" might do it. Never tried it myself, though. 
Obviously, you should backup your data before attempting. 

If you think its a dependency issue, try looking at the "Broken" filter 
in Synaptic to see if there are any broken packages. You can also compare 
a list of installed packages on each machine by doing a
"dpkg --get-selections > `uname -n`-installed-packages.txt" on each 
machine and then diff the resulting package list text files.

-- 
sktsee