I was sure I had this somewhere, but couldn’t find it, so I’ll put it here where I can find it, and if I can manage not to clutter up my Jaunty with stuff I installed “just to see what it does”, I’ll be able to use it for Karmic in October unless I decide to just upgrade rather than a clean install.

Backup installed applications:

dpkg –get-selections > installed-software.log

Save the installed-software.log somewhere it won’t be overwritten, or on a thumb drive or something.

dpkg –get-selections > /backup-directory/installed-software.log

That’ll do the same thing, but automatically save it in your backup directory, so I could just put it on a storage partition…and probably lose it amongst my other stuff. Heh.

Restore from backup:

dpkg –set-selections < installed-software.log
deselect install

Wish there was something like that for Windows except for imaging that I have to fuck around with and put on DVDs because I don’t have enough room anywhere else. The last time I attempted (I think I used Ghost), I went through the whole process only to have what should have been the last disc…fail. I really need to clean up my XP installation because there’s a shit-ton of stuff on there that I never use (because I don’t use XP for anything but PS and video conferencing anymore), but I hate the thought of sorting through all of the shit that I never use in case there’s one thing I might actually use someday. Meh…hell with it. A little better with GIMP and if I can figure out how the hell I’m supposed to make Empathy do audio/video (it’s supposed to support it, but be goddamned if I can find the option) and I’ll just wipe the whole goddamned XP partition and use the extra space for Ubuntu.

Anyway, I digress (at which I am practically a professional). As powerful and useful as I know rsync to be, I can never remember how to do the stuff I want to do with it, and be goddamned if I’m going to sit there and read through the man pages (no time, no inclination), so to transfer a large file…

rsync -ahP –stats user@host:path/to/humongous/file

Optional

–partial –progress (partial allows resume if the transfer is cancelled, and progress shows a progress bar)