[balug-talk] cloning a Debian installation

[Joe Brenner]

Dan Lyke <danlyke at flutterby.com> wrote:

> On Fri, 08 Dec 2006 11:28:17 -0800, Jonathan Jefferies wrote:
> > stress recently. But is Debian so different that it doesn't clone the
> > same as other distro's?
> 
> I think "dd", with all of its limitations, works the same across the  
> board. But something I have several times found myself doing on Debian  
> or Ubuntu machines is having different kernel, partition or whatever  
> else setups, and trying to maintain the same packages between them.
> 
> For instance my house and colo server are both running Debian, my  
> Linux development box runs Ubuntu, and I've used a variant of Will  
> Lowe's answer to make sure that I didn't have any surprise library  
> dependencies when I deployed from the Ubuntu box onto the other to  
> machines.

My situation is somewhat similar.  I wanted the same packages
installed (more or less), but there are differences between machine
architectures (AMD64 and i386x), and some big differences in
partitioning schemes.  And just to add some additional funkiness, I
was starting with a list of packages from an Ubuntu "breezy"
installation, and porting it to a Ubuntu "dapper" -- 

There *are* a few reasons I was doing it that way (rather than say, 
doing a dist-upgrade first, and then saving the package list), but 
I don't think they're worth getting into at the moment. 

Anyway, the above approach worked tolerably well, except for the fact
that there's a rather large number of packages that have had version 
numbers infect their names, and a bunch of those had disappeared
from dapper. It took some semi-manual massaging to get the bogus 
entries out of the list so that it wouldn't die in the middle.