How should we port installed packages between MX19 and MX21?

[OKie]

The apt-clone solution doesn't work. The

sudo dpkg --get-selections > dpkglist.txt

followed by

sudo dpkg --set-selections < dpkglist.txt

also doesn't work. It claims the packages aren't available, but you can see in Synaptic that they are.

So, has anyone ported their user-installed packages from MX19 to MX21, and is there a working solution?

[dolphin_oracle]

dpkg doesn't go out to the remote repos, so unless its local already it will never find anything.

you could try this.

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sudo dpkg --get-selections |grep -w install|cut -d$'\t' -f1 > dpkglist.txt

and then

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sudo apt install < $(cat dpkglist.txt)

will at least show you want isn't installable and you can refine so that your list installs.

[OKie]

From https://unix.stackexchange.com/question ... th-apt-get
As root:

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xargs -a ./dpkgselect.txt apt-get install

This command works, but the problem appears to be that many packages don't exist for MX21. For example, qalculate & medit.

I don't understand. I thought this distro was ready to go. Is there some secret repo that I need to add or should I be waiting on things?

[SwampRabbit]

This command works, but the problem appears to be that many packages don't exist for MX21. For example, qalculate & medit.

Did you check why you couldn’t find those?

qalculate-gtk is what you want and…

medit is a python2 application, therefore won’t be available in any recent Distro unless the actual developer ports it to python3.

[figueroa]

I wouldn't recommend piping any generated list into an install program or script. The following will generate a reasonable list of what the system believes to be manually installed programs.

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apt-mark showmanual

Optionally, you can output it to a file for leisurely review.

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apt-mark showmanual > installed.txt

This list is a place to start. Look through the list for those actual programs that YOU really manually installed from the commandline, synaptic, or the package installer and make your own list.

Don't include libraries, other dependencies, or anything you don't recognize. What you can, reinstall them on the new system via the MX-Package-Installer. Others, your choice to use Synaptic or the commandline. Don't speed. Unless you've collected a vast library of programs (very bad practice) your actual list should be relatively small.

Edited -- Added: Search the forums, find the following thread. viewtopic.php?p=660421#p660421

[Stevo]

Debian somehow doesn't have qalculate-gtk in Bullseye repos. Let's see if I can fix that for MX 21.

Medit is kaput, though, since it needs the removed python-gtk2 stuff.

[manyroads]

I just do something really easy, low-tech and takes about 10 minutes. I open the old .cpnfig file toye the application names I want to install in a text file such as the following:

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sudo apt install aptitude bleachbit bpytop brightnessctl caffeine celluloid conky-all dunst diodon filezilla feh gcc gcolor3 geany-plugins  grsync gsimplecal gparted grub-customizer htop i8kutils libx11-dev libxft-dev libxinerama-dev luckybackup lxappearance lxpolkit lxqt-powermanagement lxtask make neofetch nitrogen pnmixer powertop qpdfview rofi ranger suckless-tools sxhkd transmission tlp udiskie xcompmgr xdo xdotool xorg yad zenity zim

Execute that list (Note: sometimes it takes a bit to get the list right... another few minutes). FWIW. I now keep the list and just tweak it as needed; I build systems via this method about 20 times a month. My average build time (new install) on MX Linux including a transfer of 0.5TB of data takes me just over 2 hours (down from what used to be days). Maybe this will work for you. Like I said, it is simple and stupid; but it works better for me than any of the automated methods. I do the same with arch distros (programs/app names vary some from debian and my list of apps are tweaked to the distro).

[harley-peter]

I followed this instruction for an upgrade from MX 19.4 to MX 21: https://mxlinux.org/wiki/upgrading-from ... nstalling/
So there is now necessity to port packages because besides the system all the packages remain installed as before or were updated. Here after some little config changes all work fine after the upgrade.

[CharlesV]

This command works, but the problem appears to be that many packages don't exist for MX21. For example, qalculate & medit.

Did you check why you couldn’t find those?

qalculate-gtk is what you want and…

medit is a python2 application, therefore won’t be available in any recent Distro unless the actual developer ports it to python3.

Question - I thought it was ok to install python 2 (python) on mx-21 ? Would it be 'bad' to install python2 and then medit ?

[anticapitalista]

How are you going to install python2? It is no longer in the Debian repos.