Export installed packages and import them on another machine

If you don’t have any specific settings and you just want to “copy” your linux working environment like running services and so on you can install a machine with identical packages installed by exporting the list of packages and importing it on another machine.

Backup installed package list on current machine
dpkg --get-selections > selections.txt

On new machine install packages like this:
dpkg --set-selections < selections.txt
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

 

To see what packages are installed on the system, fire up:

aptitude search '~i'