Which packages have I recently installed in Ubuntu?

• ls -lat /var/lib/dpkg/info | head -20

This was very handy for me when I knew that a package I had recently installed had wreaked havoc on my machine but I just could not remember its name so that I could remove it!

Clone packages from one machine to another.

To install the same packages you have on machine A on machine B, do the following:

• A: dpkg --get-selections > list
• copy the file to machine b
• B: dpkg --set-selections < list
• B: apt-get dselect-upgrade

It should list all the packages and install them.