What did I install? (For OpenSUSE)

One thing that I didn’t get around to doing since I moved from Ubuntu was to work out how to make a note of what has been installed. This is slightly complicated by the fact that you can install stuff straight from an RPM file as well as through YAST (from the repositories or 1-click links). Well, I finally got round to working it out and here is a summary. To see what you have done with the YAST installers, just look at the log! sudo cat /var/log/YaST2/y2logRPM | more But to get everything, use the raw RPM commands: These commands show the last installed rpm packages

rpm -qa --last | more

Grep for a date:

rpm -qa --last | grep "Sun 23 Mar 2008"

Dont forget that grep takes regex’s

rpm -qa --last | grep ^kde

Another way:

rpm -qa --queryformat '%{NAME} - INSTALLED - %{INSTALLTIME:date}\n'

Or maybe:

rpm -qa --queryformat '%{installtime} %{name}-%{version}-%{release} %{installtime:date}\n' | sort -nr +0 | sed -e 's/^[^ ]* //'

UPDATE 2008-07-18: I don’t know if this feature was available prior to OpenSUSE 11.0 but you can now use the Software Management tool in YAST to generate a nice, XML list of all installed packages. Switch the filter to “Repositories” and select the “@System” repo. Then choose the menu “File/Export”. Very useful.