Re: How long to setup a new system?

["Dan Ritter-2" <user=13@nabble.blu.org>]

 > > At work, I use a configuration management system to load 
> > packages and establish config files. It takes about 2 hours 
> > from bare-metal to ready-to-be-tested. 
> > 
> > It's a lot of work initially, but modifying it is easy and 
> > the long-term time savings is wonderful. 

I should have put a bigger conceptual break here. 

> > For my desktop systems, I do 

(and this should work on any Debian-style system, including 
.*buntu) 

> > dpkg --get-selections > packagelist 
> > 
> > on a good system, copy packagelist over to the target, and 
> > 
> > dpkg --set-selections < packagelist 
> > 
> > and let apt-get take it from there. 
> 
> That's kind of cool. Do you know if there are tools that will take all the 
> packages you have on one [k]ubuntu system and allow another to configure 
> itself similarly, allowing for different hardware packages and etc?