Very Newbie Question -- How to get list of installed programs?

[Pyrosophy]

All right, I'm embarassed, but I just cannot figure this out. I've successfully installed Linux (Mandrake 7.1, RH6, etc) a couple of times and feel pretty darn comfortable with it. The problem is that, while I manually select all of the packages I want installed because they sound like such groovy things to use, I can never get a coherent list of them *back* after the installation so I know what to play with.

I really appreciate all of the work that the people at Mandrake have put into describing all those pretty packages, but I'm simply not going to take a pen to paper and "note" the ones that I like so I know to try them in the future. In Windows <beats head against table>, all of these programs would have Start Menu entries most likely, so is there an equivalent place for Linux? The start menu equivalent in KDE and Gnome seem to not contain anywhere near the magnitude of programs I installed to begin with.

Ok, so that's a newbie's newbie question, but if anyone can answer it, I'd certainly appreciate it.

Time to go study for finals.
--Pyro

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You can never be strong. You can only be free...

-Guided By Voices

[This message has been edited by Pyrosophy (edited 15 December 2000).]

[jbstew32]

They come with a few programs that list all of the Rpms installed. Mandrake has RPMDrake (that i think sucks) and also KPackage (which is a nice one with KDE). There is also one called GnoRPM that comes with GNOME. All of these come with the RPM based distros (except RPMDrake) and they will do what you need them to do (install, uninstall, and list installed packages)

Hope that helps http://www.linuxnewbie.org/ubb/smile.gif

[yvrich]

Any equivalent for Debian?

[RageAHolic]

Hmmmm...I'm going to go out on a limb and say that dselect may do that...but I'm not sure.

If the next person asks about Slack, you can look in /var/log/packages.



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...your friendly neighborhood RageAHolic (http://www.angelfire.com/electronic/RageAHolic/index.html)

Rage fueled by: AMD Athlon

[milanuk]

Well, I may be wrong, but I believe that in rpm-based distro's you can do the following:

rpm -qpi *.rpm > ~/rpmlist.txt
(see http://www.mandrakeuser.org/basics/brpm4.html#how for more.)


To query the rpm database for installed packages. And yes, I still append a .txt suffix to my text files so I _know_ what the heck they are(sometimes I don't have color terminal capabilities)

Under Debian there is a similar option for dpkg, something along the lines of:

dpkg --get-selections

There is probably some other flag in there as well, but the cool thing about this on Debian is that you can use this to generate a list that can be transported to another machine to 'replicate' the identical package base by feeding it back to dpkg (or apt-get, I forget which)

Monte


[This message has been edited by milanuk (edited 15 December 2000).]

[posterboy]

rpm -qa >rpms.txt works good, too. Looking for a package when you just "kinda" know it's name: rpm -qa |grep partofname works every time. Ray


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ray@raymondjones.net
HTTP://www.raymondjones.net

[jbstew32]

yes, in fact, dselect will tell what is installed. Just run it and go to the "select" option to see what is installed and also what you have the option of installing (from the source you specify).

There is also an apt command that will do the same.I am not sure what it is though.

[Pyrosophy]

Thanks to everyone for their replies. I now have a better idea of what names of what programs are installed, though the descriptions leave something to be desired...

Thanks again,
Adam

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You can never be strong. You can only be free...

-Guided By Voices