[Tfug] List of packages required to make a good Debian Desktop system

[Claude Rubinson]

On Wed, Jul 04, 2007 at 10:36:45PM -0700, Glen Pfeiffer wrote:
> I am putting together a list of software that I use on my Debian 
> boxes. There are two reasons I am doing this. First, because I 
> cannot remember it all and I want to have a reference of what 
> works for me while I am setting up new systems for friends and 
> family. A second objective is to share it with others. I expect 
> it would be most helpful to those new to Linux and Debian. Some 
> of my choices were influenced because I run GNOME.

Glen -- I realize that I'm not answering your actual questions but I
hate the idea that you're doing this manually.

As you're using Debian, you can grab all currently installed packages
in a variety of ways: `dpkg --get-selections` will pull everything.
If you use aptitude (which tracks automatically installed packages),
you can run `aptitude -F '%p' search '~i !~M'` to get all manually
installed packages.  Dump the results to a text file which you can
pipe to apt-get/aptitude to recreate/install your system.

And after you pull all of your packages, you could muck around with
the debtags and package descriptions to generate your listing.  Never
done this before, so I'm not sure what programs you'd use for this.

Claude