Users who test many applications, install multiple packages and make many changes to our distros to test it, improve it or just for fun, sometimes end up with an operating system with many things installed and in my case many times with packages that neither idea when or for you to install them. Likewise, sometimes we prefer to return to the initial state of our distro to start from scratch, to speed up this restoration process Resetter has been created, an excellent application to restore a distro based on Debian / Ubuntu.
What is Resetter?
It is an open source tool, developed in python and pyqt that allows us to restore a Debian or Ubuntu based distro to its original state, without the need to use a distro image or complex package removal processes and more.
To restore our distro, the tool uses the update manifest of each distribution which compares it with the list of currently installed packages, the installed packages that differ from the manifest are uninstalled and can be installed in the future.
This tool claims its development team that it is compatible with the following distros,
- Linux Mint 18.1 (tested by me)
- Linux Mint 18
- Linux Mint 17.3
- Ubuntu 17.04
- Ubuntu 16.10
- Ubuntu 16.04
- Ubuntu 14.04
- Basic OS 0.4
- Debian Jessie
- Linux Deepin 15.4 (pstolen by me)
Resetter Features
- Open source tool, with high support and a fairly high level of stability.
- Easy to install and use.
- Allows you to create a list of applications that you want to be installed after restoring to the base version of your distro.
- It allows the storage of a copy of the state of your current distro, with which in the future you can install the applications of said copy.
- Simple installation of PPA from the tool.
- Powerful PPA editor, which allows you to deactivate, activate and eliminate PPAS for any user in the system.
- Various installation options.
- Manual and automatic reset mode.
- Possibility of removing old kernels.
- Allows you to delete users and their directories.
- Many others more.
How to install Resetter?
Installing Resetter is quite simple, just download the .deb file corresponding to the latest version here. Then install the .deb package as usual, so that you start enjoying the application.
Similarly, it is recommended that before installing Resetter download the add-apt-key package with wget with the following command wget -c http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/universe/a/add-apt-key/add-apt-key_1.0-0.5_all.deb then please install it with gdebi by executing the following command sudo gdebi add-apt-key_1.0-0.5_all.deb
How to restore a Debian based distro?
We can restore a Debian / Ubuntu-based distro with Resetter easily and quickly, when we run the application it immediately identifies our distro and its characteristics in addition to the update manifest. In the same way, the tool shows us three options that will allow us to carry out certain tasks that we detail below:
- easy install: It allows us to create a list of applications that will be installed after restoring your system, or for future package installation.
- automatic reset: Provides the possibility of restoring a Debian / Ubuntu-based distro automatically, it will do a standard restore, also eliminating users and home directories as well as making a backup.
- custom reset: It offers us a personalized restoration, where we can choose the ppa that we want to install, the users and directories that we want to eliminate, eliminate old kernels, applications to eliminate among others.
Once any of the aforementioned options have been chosen, we must follow the simple instructions that the tool indicates.
We hope that with this tool you can obtain favorable results, recommending its use in production prior to testing in development environments. Backing up the information by your own means is also advisable.
It is worth noting that the automatic procedure carried out by this application can be done with simple commands, but that this is a very practical way to do it.