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Given an installation based on Yum (specifically in my case, a Scientific Linux 5.1 x86_64 installation), how would I duplicate the installed programs and utilities to a new machine based on Fedora Core x86_64? The hardware is very similar but not identical, and there's the obvious difference that SL5 is based on EL, not on Fedora; I'm largely aiming to duplicate the user experience from the original box (SL) to the new box (FC).

You can create a list of the installed software with:

$ rpm -qa > installed-software.log

Since they are based on different distros, I am not sure how you would do the install.

If I was copying it to a fresh install of the same distro, I would run the following command as root

# yum -y install $(cat /home/user/installed-software.log)

Get list of installed RPMs on your RHEL box:

yum list installed |tail -n +3|cut -d' ' -f1 > installed_packages.txt

Install packages onto Fedora:

yum -y install $(cat installed_packages.txt)

Note: Fedora is the R&D project for RHEL and you should be able to install most of these packages in Fedora.

Steves method lists version numbers and you want to avoid that.

You can try Kickstart or you may want to set up a PXE install/boot server for multiple distros. Or if some of your machines are diskless you can try LTPS method (this is what is generally called - thin client - IIRC), also see here

EDIT: If that's the case see this

I believe Dejan's answer https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/25729/346788 is the best one for yum based system. However, it may not work when you ssh into the server due to the buffer. Details at How to get `yum list` output to stay on one line when getting output via remote ssh command?

Thus, to slightly improve, to get the full list of package:

yum list installed | xargs -n3 | column -t | tail -n +3 |cut -d' ' -f1

To get the list of package installed from a rpm:

yum list installed | xargs -n3 | column -t | grep -v "@" | tail -n +3 |cut -d' ' -f1

To get the list of package installed from yum:

yum list installed | xargs -n3 | column -t | grep "@" | tail -n +3 |cut -d' ' -f1