Arch Linux

dacorsa

Member

Registered: 2025-04-04

Posts: 7

How migrate from debian to arch reinstalling the same package?

Hi Guys,
i'm new of Arch, i have a list of package installed on my previous installation of debian, how can i automatically reinstall these package on Arch?
Please see the file attached (myList)

https://limewire.com/d/zsy3i#TWCoWodbm9

Thanks, best regards.

mackin_cheese

Member

Registered: 2025-01-07

Posts: 380

Re: How migrate from debian to arch reinstalling the same package?

1. please post your list in a pastebin, we are not going to be downloading random files on the internet.
2. read up on pacman and the aur.

dacorsa

Member

Registered: 2025-04-04

Posts: 7

Re: How migrate from debian to arch reinstalling the same package?

1. please post your list in a pastebin, we are not going to be downloading random files on the internet.
2. read up on pacman and the aur.

ok thanks, i have uploaded here:

https://paste.ubuntu.com/p/CyW8JbsHm9/
or
https://pastebin.com/uXuU9piG

thanks

Scimmia

Fellow

Registered: 2012-09-01

Posts: 12,553

Re: How migrate from debian to arch reinstalling the same package?

That is not a useful list. There's no way you were using everything on that list, and most certainly since it contains all package, including ones that were only installed as deps of other packages. Even if you did really want all of those, there's no automated way of converting them, and many of them aren't in the repos anyway.

linux_one

Member

Registered: 2022-03-11

Posts: 6

Re: How migrate from debian to arch reinstalling the same package?

You can list the installed packages excluding ones installed as dependencies with the following command:

apt list --installed | grep -v automatic | awk -F "/" '{ print $1 }'

dacorsa

Member

Registered: 2025-04-04

Posts: 7

Re: How migrate from debian to arch reinstalling the same package?

You can list the installed packages excluding ones installed as dependencies with the following command:

apt list --installed | grep -v automatic | awk -F "/" '{ print $1 }'

Thanks @linux_one i used your command, now i hope to find the same name in arch repository (hope don't fall in the problem that @Scimmia said)

Thanks to all, i will try

Last edited by dacorsa (Yesterday 19:01:22)

dacorsa

Member

Registered: 2025-04-04

Posts: 7

Re: How migrate from debian to arch reinstalling the same package?

is possible to convert a list from deb package to arch package?

dacorsa

Member

Registered: 2025-04-04

Posts: 7

Re: How migrate from debian to arch reinstalling the same package?

maybe i have found this :
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/debtap

dacorsa

Member

Registered: 2025-04-04

Posts: 7

Re: How migrate from debian to arch reinstalling the same package?

but not change a list from deb to arch only packages...

Lone_Wolf

Administrator

From: Netherlands, Europe

Registered: 2005-10-04

Posts: 13,482

Re: How migrate from debian to arch reinstalling the same package?

Nope, because debian and archlinux devs make different decisions related to how things are build .

One example is debian splitting files between foo and foo-dev packages . Archlinux typically only has foo (which includes the files debian puts in foo-dev )

create a high level list of applications you use on debian and use that to look up package names on arch .

An example of such  a list :
refind, lxqt, firefox , krusader, thunderbird, libreoffice, okular, wine, freecol, openmw, vlc , nano , konsole

---

Disliking systemd intensely, but not satisfied with alternatives so focusing on taming systemd.

clean chroot building not flexible enough ?
Try clean chroot manager by graysky

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 30,347

Website

Re: How migrate from debian to arch reinstalling the same package?

There is no trivial means to convert a list of package names between distros - though that is a great idea for a tool if one doesn't already exist somewhere (as it's quite practical to do reasonably well in theory).

A simple first approximation could be get a list of binaries and libs (e.g., under /usr/bin/ and /usr/lib - but trimming to use only non-versioned so-names) provided by the debian packages in question, then generate a list of arch packages that contain these files and removing duplicates.  Including more files from different filesystem locations would reduce misses, but could add quite a lot of complexity just from there being some differences in filesystem layout and potential for non-unique filenames in different packages (hence using /usr/{bin,lib} first as this is much less likely).

This would miss any packages providing fonts, icon sets, etc, but should not have any true false positives.  (Converting from arch to deb would be prone to pseudo-false-positives as all "-dev" packages would be included when perhaps not needed / wanted).

A complete tool for this job could ideally also produce different levels of output, e.g., confident matches, suspected / proposed matches, and remaining deb content not detected in arch packages.

Last edited by Trilby (Today 12:51:03)

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"UNIX is simple and coherent" - Dennis Ritchie; "GNU's Not Unix" - Richard Stallman

dacorsa

Member

Registered: 2025-04-04

Posts: 7

Re: How migrate from debian to arch reinstalling the same package?

Thanks @Lone_Wolf and Trilby, i understood