Can I look at the upgrade log after a distribution upgrade?

I've upgraded to Ubuntu 12.04 and did it offline using the alternative CD. I didn't look at the "packages to remove" section before clicking next - I've done Ubuntu upgrades many times and assumed it was just the normal set of obsolete library packages etc. But I do tend to watch the terminal text go by and see what it's doing, and I saw it removing a number of packages I wanted. I guess these are packages that aren't on the CD that can't co-exist with the new Ubuntu.

Anyway, I want to find which packages have been removed. So does the update log get saved somewhere?

Then I can start doing some grepping on it and then reinstall the packages I did want.

Solution 1:

Found it in the end - should have looked harder before asking the question. Anyway, it is in /var/log/dist-upgrade - quite a bit of info in there. In my case:

$ ls -l /var/log/dist-upgrade/
total 1984
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 598030 May  3 20:01 apt-clone_system_state.tar.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 308107 May  4 08:56 apt.log
-rw-r--r-- 1 root adm  514929 May  4 09:01 apt-term.log
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 103992 May  4 08:57 history.log
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   2526 May  3 20:01 lspci.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  72747 May  3 20:31 main.log
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 401853 May  3 20:30 term.log
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root     74 May  3 20:30 xorg_fixup.log

Solution 2:

There is some logging in /var/log/dpkg.log. Hope you find what you're looking for, but beware that it is hard to spot dependencies there.