[Cialug] Updates after install

[Daniel A. Ramaley]

On Friday January 30 2009 16:54, Tom Sellers wrote:
>Is there a way to see what updates have been installed to my computer
> since loading Debian 4.0 from CD?

Probably not immediately helpful for you, but right after setting up a 
new machine i always run this:
    # aptitude search '~i!~M' -F '%p' | sed -e 's/ *$//;' \
        | sort > /root/base_packages.txt

What that does is gets a list of packages that were manually selected 
for install (aka, not automatically installed). It will include 
packages that were part of the base install, as well as those you've 
selected. Later if you run the same query and save to a different file, 
it is easy to see what changes have been made. Also, if you keep a 
backup of that file, it is fairly easy to set up an almost identical 
machine using something like this:
    # aptitude --prompt install `xargs < packages.txt`
    # aptitude --prompt unmarkauto `xargs < packages.txt`

Also possibly useful, if you want to see packages that were part of the 
initial install but that you've since removed, this query should get 
them:
    # aptitude search \
        '!~i(~pimportant|~pstandard|~prequired)' -F '%p %P'

All of these commands were pulled from my Debian installation notes.

Now, more to your specific question. If i had installed Debian from CD 
but wanted to know what changes had been made since then, i'd probably 
try a query similar to the one i listed first but including the version 
numbers of each package (try adding "%v" to the -F argument). Then i'd 
get a list of all packages from the CD (again with their version 
numbers), munge both to be in the same format, and do a diff. I don't 
know what your comfort level with the command line is though; there's 
probably a GUI way to do it but it would have to be up to someone else 
to figure that out.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dan Ramaley                            Dial Center 118, Drake University
Network Programmer/Analyst             2407 Carpenter Ave
+1 515 271-4540                        Des Moines IA 50311 USA