#HowTo #ByJuho – How to install clean GNU/Linukka aka. GNU/Linux onto bigger laptop 2.5″ HDD and all your apt-get’table applications and document and configuration files from an older smaller disk to bigger?
#needsudo not gonna work without sudo rights
#need $20 USB-to-SATA casing and a screwdriver
#alternative similar effect producing method is to use the casing and use dd to move partitions around and Gparted to resize them.
# what it doesn’t do? It doesn’t move password file so this will no work for a system then one user. It does not move /root-directory contents in case there is something there and it does not move any server software set-up except for the apt-gettable software.
# Run in the old GNU/Linukka to get complete list of # ‘apt-get install’ed packages onto packages.list
‘dpkg –get-selections > packages.list’
Grab the confs ‘tar cvzf system-name-dot-dirs-YYYY-MM-DD.tar.gz .kde/ .config/ .bashrc .profile .gimp-2.8/ .ssh/’ and extract those to the new machine’s home directory so the installers detect the existing settings and should be happy with that. Another way to go about this would be to install the software first and then extract the confs over the default ones created by the installers but this would appear more prone to errors in my opinion.
# Move this packages.list file (no need to compress it. it is few tens of kilobytes long) to the
# Now you could try
‘sudo dpkg –set-selections < packages.list’
straight ahead but for me it complained about not finding obviously existing packages such as ‘apache2’ so I consulted the dpkg man page
# So first run
‘ sudo apt-get install dselect’
# and run
‘sudo dselect update’
# and you will get the latest fullest catalogue of apt-gettable software from the repositories
# Now you are ready to set dpkg (Debian PacKaGe management) selections from the file
‘sudo dpkg –set-selections < packages.list’
# now install all packages that were set in the previous command from packages.list. This is obviously going to take a some time but you’re almost there.
‘sudo apt-get dselect-upgrade’
# You can now use your favourite method of recovering your files stored in /home are restored
#I didn’t just mount the old /home partition. Instead I put it into a USB-to-SATA casing and used that to connect the HDD into the freshly installed system and copied them over.
# Alternatives are using a 3rd (removable) HDD to move the files or upload to server or cloud and download to new system.
# recursively copying all directories from the old /home partition
‘sudo cp /media/username/UUIDgoeshere /home -R’