[balug-talk] cloning a Debian installation

[Joe Brenner]

What's your favorite method for duplicating a Debian (or Debian-based)
installation from one machine on to another?  

At the moment I'm just looking for a way to get a listing of installed 
packages on one box, and using that list to install packages on another...

And I've been playing around with the "wajig" program, which provides a
reasonably convenient command-line interface (a little better than
aptitude, to my eye): 

  http://www.togaware.com/wajig

So on the machine to be cloned, I might do this:

  wajig snapshot > /tmp/packages_with_versions.lst
  cat packages_with_versions.lst | cut -d= -f1 > packages.lst

Then, after copying packages.lst to the target machine, I might 
just do something like this: 

  su 
  cat packages.lst | xargs apt-get -y install

Does that sound about right?