Hello Debian users,
I was looking for a way to purge or remove all the packages that were installed on a Debian system after the initial (bare bone) minimal system installation. I have searched on Google for "How to reduce a Debian system to a base system" but it seems like the topic of interest was to reduce the memory consumption of the installed system, which is not my consern.
In essence I would like to revert my system back to a freshly installed state, without reinstalling. Ultimatly is this possible?
I have tried a few options already, which did not work :
1)
I ran
dpkg --get-selections > to file
from a (bare bone) minimal installation of Debian Lenny or Squeeze, and then ran
dpkg --set-selections < from file
on the non fresh system.
*This method only adds and upgrades packages, it will not remove packages that do not exist in the list
2)
I executed dselect (a dpkg frontend), entered the select menu and pressed "-" ( or "_" to purge) at the top where "All packages" was, but this turns out to be a very distructive removal process taking the linux kernel, grub bootloader, and even further package management utilities like apt.
This is not was I was expecting after reading:
Note that it's not possible to remove "All Packages". If you try that, your system will instead be reduced to the initial installed base packages. [1]
3)
Even with the powers of aptitude I am unable to revert the systems package state. Perhaps I missed something with this tool?
Your help is much appreciated!
[1] - http://www.debian.org/doc/FAQ/ch-pkgtools.en.html
-M
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