In making the updated Ubuntu image I needed a way to closely duplicate the existing image. The new one is using armhf, but the old one was armel. So it was necessary to backup the ubuntu package selections and restore them into the new image.
This is how it is done. You can use it to duplicate the installed packages from another machine. This way you can easily get your A10 device to have duplicate packages as your desktop or server Debian or Ubuntu. Unfortunately it can't easily be done as a cross-distro such as Ubuntu > Debian or vice versa. But you could edit the file to align the packages.
backup:
dpkg --get-selections > dpkglist.txt
Restore:
dpkg --set-selections < dpkglist.txt
apt-get -y update
apt-get dselect-upgrade