how to recover installed packages from old ubuntu?

Question

I had ubuntu in my laptop and I must have done something because when I rebooted it did notgo all the way.There seemed to be no OS at all. My hard disk is working. I removed the hard disk and used a sata cable and connected to another laptop ;it reads fine.

SO to recover the data I made a USB bootable Knoppix OS and opened the laptop. Sure enough I could see all the files and data there. But the problem is, I will reinstall the same version of ubuntu again . How do i make sure I have the packages and software that I had installed in the ubbuntu which had just crashed. for example I had installed Opencv, Qt Octave and other stuff installed . How can I have these in the new version without installing it again from the net.

Can I just copy all the folders from the previous ubunutu like opt,etc,tmp and paste it and replace it in the new ubuntu?

PS. there are other questions like this. But this is not the same. I don't have the old ubuntu. I can just access the directories through knoppix. In other words Idon't have the ubuntu shell. Just knoppix

possible duplicate of How can I backup my programs/applications, so that after I reinstall a new one, I can still use the backup-ed ones? — JoKeR, Jun 15 '15 at 07:22

score 0 · Answer 1 · edited Jun 15 '15 at 08:49

As I am running fine with Debian Jessie, I can only assume the path to be similiar:

/var/cache/apt/archives/

If you did NOT regulary

$ sudo apt-get clean all

You will find there all the installed packages, representing the physical files of

$dpkg --list

To keep your current settings, you probably want to go for the /home directory. And for sure the directories you mentioned. Did you inspect your grub bootloader?

how to recover installed packages from old ubuntu?

1 Answers1