For ever now some friends and I have been talking about making essential packages, which would pull in all the tools that we often use on Debian. So here goes…

With the power of the equivs package, this is actually a very short procedure.

We start off and install equivs…

    $ apt-get install equivs

Then we setup a place to build the packages…

    $ mkdir -p ~/essentials
    $ cd ~/essentials

And run equivs-control to start a Debian/control file:

    $ equivs-control bartman-control

The tool will create a template that you need to fill in, most lines can be ignored. You will want to edit this file to your liking.

Here is mine; it includes packages that I end up installing at some point on any desktop/workstation.

The next step is to build the deb…

    $ equivs-build bartman-essential
    ...
    dpkg-deb: building package `bartman-essential' in `../bartman-essential_1.0_all.deb'.

And that’s it. To install this on a new system you can run:

    dpkg -i bartman-essential_1.0_all.deb
    apt-get install -f

And you’re done.