How to find what 'new' packages have been installed?

[Mario Vukelic]

On Wed, 2008-11-12 at 22:11 -0800, Ray Parrish wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I don't know how to get a list of the programs I've installed in Ubuntu 
> myself, but I do know a couple of ways of looking up a list of *all* of 
> the software installed on your system.
<snip>
> cd /usr/share/doc
<snip>
> ls -a --group-directories-first
<snip>
> file:///var/lib/dpkg/status
> 
> It's a text file so you can load it in your web browser.

An easier way to get a list of all installed packages is "dpkg
-l" (whose output can be redirected into a file or piped into a pager).
dpkg -l will also tell you the installed version and a one-liner about
the purpose of the package as well as its installation status.

There is also "dpkg --get-selections", but note that the corresponding
--set-selections is not recommended to set the installed packages for
whole systems, because it will set all packages to "manually installed"