Sunday 23 October 2005 at 12:47 am
Really, What a lovely OS is Debian.
I must admire its technical design. Recently I had to wipe out my hard drive for some reasons. I had put a lot of effort into selection of packages and configuration as per my taste.
And guess what, re-installation is a cool breeze in Debian. Every setting and every package (from multiple sources) were back. I use a mixture of Testing + Unstable + Experimental + (Some other apt sources) on my laptop.
Backup your /home and /etc directory. I'll leave /etc/ upto you but /home/ is important. Right ? Also backup any non-standard path where you might have saved important data
dpkg --get-selections > package-selection.txt. This will make a database of the packages installed on your system. This is important, don't forget to copy it to another reliable media
Also backup your /etc/apt/ folder. I back it up because that's where the core repository settings are.
Wipe out your hard drive now.
Do a new installation of Debian. Try to make it a bare minimum installation.
Restore your /home back.
Resotre your /etc/apt/sources.list, /etc/apt/preferences and other important ones that you might have.
Obviously you'll do an `apt-get update`
Now the game to restore everything back as it was in the beginning. `dpkg --set-selections <package-selection.txt`
That'll will do the rest of the job for you bringing back every package you had installed from different sources.
Just to note is that if you had custom built packages (list Sun Java or Pine or Qmail et cetera), you'll have to re-build and re-install them manually. If you also don't want to configure your system configurations you might want to re-store your /etc/apt folder.
Hope this has helped you. Cheers!
Wednesday 12 October 2005 at 4:43 pm
Just how would it look if Mac were to come with Dell laptops.
The screenshot might give some picture. :-)
Sunday 02 October 2005 at 06:24 am
Today, I’m quite happily influenced by blogging. Different people have different ways of defining and using this new trend.
For me, it was always difficult to store small documents for system configuration and tips for making life simpler with computers. Earlier I ended up with having multiple documents in my machine.
With blogging, I can dump all my small documents in my blog and have it readily available when and where required. The other beauty is that it is well open for others who could find it useful.
Sunday 02 October 2005 at 05:57 am
At times, for people like me who use a heterogeneous set of packages, it becomes necessary to put certain packages on “hold” so that nothing breaks.
The plain dpkg way of putting packages on hold is very very simple.
I’ll be taking a package named “foo” as an example. Here are the steps:
pre>1) dpkg —get-selections foo > selections.txt
This will give you the package and its state on your system. The output written to selections.txt would be something like this:
pre>foo install
2) Replace the text “install” with “hold” in the selections.txt file.
pre>3) dpkg —set-selections < selections.txt
This will change the state of package “foo” from “install” to “hold”.
That’s it.
Please leave a comment if you have any suggestion.
Sunday 02 October 2005 at 05:32 am
Some quick steps to create an Option for “New SSH Session” under Konsole which includes keychain and ssh-agent for password-less ssh logins.
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Sunday 02 October 2005 at 04:58 am
Small HOWTO on configuring POP3 SSL with Fetchmail.
Here I assume that the server’s SSL certificate is a Self Signed Certificate
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