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How to determine whether a given package is shipped by default in Ubuntu installation or it's installed later by the user?!

The answer in this U&L says:

To figure out if a package (Tor here) is installed by user, run this in terminal:

apt-cache show tor | grep Priority

if the priority was optional‍‍‍‍‍, The package was installed by user, If was standard (important on Debian ) it's a default installed package.

While a simple test for example ubuntu-desktop

$ apt-cache show ubuntu-desktop | grep Priority

gives:

Priority: optional

Then I could say this is not a proper way.

So how to determine whether the package is shipped by default or not?

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To determine whether a package is included by default in a given Ubuntu installation, search for the package name in the manifest file of that Ubuntu release.

Examples

  1. Searching for the ubuntu-desktop package in Ubuntu 14.04.2 64-bit manifest shows that ubuntu-desktop is included by default in the Ubuntu 14.04.2 64-bit ISO file.

  2. Searching for the sysinfo package in the Ubuntu 14.04.2 64-bit manifest shows that sysinfo is not included by default in the Ubuntu 14.04.2 64-bit ISO file.

There is a link to the manifest file for Ubuntu 14.04.2 at the Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS (Trusty Tahr) - Ubuntu Releases webpage.

Offline method

It is also possible to find whether a package is included by default in a given Ubuntu installation offline without an internet connection, if you have already downloaded the ISO file for that Ubuntu installation.

  1. Browse to the ISO file for Ubuntu 14.04 if you have downloaded it, and open it with Archive Manager.

  2. Extract the filesystem.manifest file which is located in the /casper directory.

  3. Open the filesystem.manifest file in a text editor, like Gedit for example.

  4. Search in the filesystem.manifest file for ubuntu-desktop, etc. the same way as in the previous examples.

  5. Make a default.txt file containing a list of the package names of all the default packages with each package name on a separate line for easy searching from the terminal:

     cat filesystem.manifest | awk '{print $1}' | sort > default.txt
    
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  • How about doing it offline? with no Internet connection?
    – Maythux
    Jun 13, 2015 at 13:06
  • A more simpler solution would be better, Is't there a command or some hack to fetch the result?
    – Maythux
    Jun 13, 2015 at 13:31

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