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