[SOLVED] What is the exact process involved in creating installable .iso "snapshots" ..

exoshwarze · 07-13-2011, 05:56 PM

What is the exact process involved in creating installable .iso "snapshots" of your linux system ?

As I am now installing and configuring progressively more difficult distros (ie. Arch Linux, Slackware, Gentoo, Source Mage, etc.) I find that it would now be more convenient to save "snapshots" of my completed systems for later use whenever I feel like a change .

Any help would be greatly appreciated .

sag47 · 07-13-2011, 06:10 PM

Depends, if you want to just have an OS image then it is better to zero your free space with a dummy file and take an image using something like clonezilla. The point of zeroing your free space is to make the image as small as possible.

Code:

dd if=/dev/zero of=~/dummy
rm ~/dummy

Alternatively you could customize the packages on an install disk and rebuild it into it's own bootable live ISO. I have discussed this in another thread.

exoshwarze · 07-13-2011, 06:26 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sag47

Depends, if you want to just have an OS image then it is better to zero your free space with a dummy file and take an image using something like clonezilla. The point of zeroing your free space is to make the image as small as possible.

Code:

dd if=/dev/zero of=~/dummy
rm ~/dummy

Alternatively you could customize the packages on an install disk and rebuild it into it's own bootable live ISO. I have discussed this in another thread.

Okay, but what exactly does

Code:

dd if=/dev/zero of=~/dummy
rm ~/dummy

do ? Do I run this code from within the cloning program, or from the Linux system in question ?

sag47 · 07-13-2011, 07:57 PM

Those commands you run in the terminal. dd is a standard GNU/Unix/Linux command so check it out in the man pages.

Code:

man dd

/dev/zero is a standard device which does nothing but write zeroes as output. So basically you are outputting all zeroes to a single file. Essentially what this does is fill your free space with zeroes so that when your image created from clonezilla is compressed it will be really small because most of the image will be zero. Once you run out of free space then you delete the file ~/dummy. Then take your clonezilla image.

SAM

exoshwarze · 07-16-2011, 11:14 AM

Yes, I know what dd is; I have used it for a while now .

And that's nifty . Thank you . ^^

sag47 · 07-16-2011, 12:59 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by exoshwarze

Yes, I know what dd is; I have used it for a while now .

And that's nifty . Thank you . ^^

Likewise you can scramble hard drives with /dev/random.