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I recently installed Debian from a live 7.5-amd64 image (downloaded from Debian's site) to a new laptop. I also apt-get install'ed a few additional Debian packages. I would like to clone this installation in another machine.

I imagine that one way to do this, when the second machine has the same hardware, would be to create an image of it, burn it to DVD, and directly copy it to the new machine's hard drive.

This is just a guess; I would have to do a lot more research to fill in the details.

But, more importantly, this technique may break down if the hardware of the target machine differs significantly from that of the original machine.

Is there some some way to get a description of the current installation that I could "play back" at the time of installing Debian on a new system? (This description would have to include the choices made during the initial installation, as well as all the additional packages that were installed subsequently.)

If not, is there at least a way to get a listing of all the packages installed after the initial Debian installation from the live image?

Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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kjo
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  • The easiest way is to install a minimal Debian system on a new machine and use rsync to copy the most important directories such as /home /etc /usr /var /root from an old system to new system. Do not copy files such as fstab. I used this technique to move an Ubuntu installation from a dual-boot machine to VirtualBox. This is not enough for an answer but may be a good place to start. – Arkadiusz Drabczyk Jun 22 '14 at 22:47
  • Get the list of all installed packages on original machine, install a fresh system on new machine, apt-get install the list of packages you got at step 1, copy home folders.downside is it takes time, upside is all the machine dependent files are correctly set up. – didierc Jun 23 '14 at 01:01

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