On Thu, May 28, 2020 at 12:15:41PM +0700, Victor Sudakov wrote:
> Dan Ritter wrote:
> > There is no pristine state for Debian.
>
> There should be, even if this "pristine state" is but a list of packages
> at the moment of the first boot.
But that set is NOT the same for everyone. The installer selects
some based on the hardware that it discovers during the installation,
and you select some in the task selection menu. Also, there are several
different installer images, including some that are meant to be used as
live, and some that have non-free firmware packages.
If *you*, the one person on the planet who wants this, would like to
achieve your goal, what you can do is get a snapshot of *your* packages
immediately after the installation, by running
dpkg --get-selections > /root/initial-packages
Just hold on to that file, and it will allow you to return to this
state on the same machine, or conceivably even a different machine.
My approach to something similar (in my case, when Installation of the packages I want are complete, and the first "apt-get upgrade" is finished), is to do a clean Shutdown, boot from a Rescue CD (or USB), and issue a "tar cvf" on the Mounted Directory.
Why "tar and feather" from another Linux, instead of the running one? To avoid the "Virtual File Systems", such as, for example, /proc.
<snip complaining about complaining>
Good luck!
Kenneth Parker