Are there any tools that will make it possible to 'capture' the installation/configuration of a system and mirror/replay it at other computers or make it possible to restore a system after a problem?

There are several different uses for this, but in each case, it would save a lot of overhead to just backup the information *about* installed software and the configuration files, instead of backing up all the actual data. It would save a lot of space and network bandwidth and if done properly, could be the basis for a slightly modified installation.

I am currently using Ubuntu, so if there is something like this available for that distro, I'd be glad to hear it. Learning about such tools for other distros (maybe enterprise level?) would be interesting too though.

fedora / redhat / centos use kickstart which does a fully automated installation with a lot of potential personalisation too. very very good.

Thank you for that tip -- looks very good!
I have found a package system-config-kickstart for Ubuntu, so this seems to be available here too.

Unfortunately, when I try to do
system-config-kickstart --generate somefile
I get the following error message:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/share/system-config-kickstart/system-config-kickstart.py", line 58, in ?
useCliMode(value)
File "/usr/share/system-config-kickstart/system-config-kickstart.py", line 41, in useCliMode
import profileSystem
File "/usr/share/system-config-kickstart/profileSystem.py", line 23, in ?
import language_backend
ImportError: No module named language_backend

I must confess I have no idea what to do now ... I would have expected that any library
dependency should have been resolved to run this :/