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 _________________________________________________________________ Stay in touch. http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9712959
