Hello, not sure where to start but after installing/downloading all software and drivers and after tweaking a system you could say that a lot of blood sweat and tears have gone into a pc. especially the downloading part takes hours to complete, updates en additional software. now, besides configuring a system i would like to use it too and, believe it or not, but there is life outside the (linux) box. i have a wife, 3 kids and a job to go to so it would be nice if there was a way that all this hard work can be backed up in the form of a live cd/dvd that can be used on multiple pc's. another solution would be more of a compromise in the form of a backup made with partimage. the trouble here is that you need to have (correct me if i am wrong) a hard drive wise identical setup on the 'clone' machines or else you get all sorts of boot problems. i was never able to succesfully manually install a bootloader and i (which is only one person) have never seen lilo work, so grub gets the favour. a live cd (ubuntu does a good job at it in my opinion) sets up the bootloader for you. this one, unlike the mepis one, recognizes all existing os's and they all boot from it too. big plus for me! is there anyone out there that understands or just recognizes this problem and/or has a solution to it? i am sure this would be very usefull to many, not just me.

thanks
Ron.

Perhaps if you backed it up to another machine? Do you have one?

Good Day

go visit http://www.linux-live.org/, here are scripts to create a live CD from your installed Distribution.

Cheers

there are also some goodies from morphix.

Thanks, I will check out the posibilities suggested and report back my experiences. I have other machines to play with. and i will check out that website for the live cd's first as that comes closest to what i want.

I know exactly how you feel

As already pointed out in this post, there is the livecd-scripts to create a livecd of your current system. I found the scripts did not work for me so I decided to build my own from scratch, but this is only the start my main aim is to create an installation cd that will have everything already installed so I don't have to install or configure any additonal software

The disks don't have to be the same size, just as long as they are not smaller than the size of the data. For example if you have 40 GB drivr with 3GB of data you can place it on a 5GB disk, you just need allow enough space for the OS to work plus some space for users home directories.

The beauty of linux is the /proc and /sysfs that the kernels use, these are psuedo-filesystems. Which basically mean these are dynamic and detect all the hardware of the machine at bootup. I have actually migrated a linux OS from a very old machine to a brand new one without any dramas. They only thing you will have problems with is the video card settings, for me I just cheated a bit and used some programs that knoppix livcd uses and build my own script that detects and creates the xorg.conf on the fly.

OK I have never had this trouble, but I personally prefer grub over lilo. Grub just seems to be far superior as a bootloader, it has a file that can be used to boot cdrom's, as far as I know lilo cannot boot cdrom's.

Thanks for all replies, I have tried http://www.linux-live.org/ and for me too the scripts did not work. I would like to know how fotoguy progresses with his live cd/dvd. i am not so saffy with all things linux, i find every bit of software that i can get to work besides office apps, internet and everything else that is pretty standard in a distro, an accomplishment. i prefer not to use windows specific software under wine but i found that sometimes 'cheating' gets the job done.

and to respond to what Bruce Hill says about backing up a harddrive on a remote machine, would it be the same if i made a backup with partimage and then write it back to the other machine? it is just that i understand partimage reasonably well.

ron

I know nothing of partimage at all. You could use Ghost and backup your entire disk. Whichever app you choose, please read the directions carefully. If you have questions, try and post something such as:

Ghost says it can backup a partition to an image. Which partition should I backup? This is the output of "fdisk -l" on my hard drive:
and what is this "image" that I am backing up to?

Then you show that you've working with us and we know how far you got before you needed help.

partimage lives on the mepis live cd and i have worked with that before. i also know of a program called ghost but i believe that is from symantec and works under ms dos (the old version i know anyway). sooner or later i will give this a try but first i want to resolve a few problems i have on my system. this may take some time all together as i have many other things to do. i am also new to forums in general so if here or there i don't use the forum correctly then i apologise, i am in the process of learning and i have a hard time understanding.

The live cd is completed to some degree, I original used slackware 10.0 to create a few prototypes while waiting for slackware 11.0 to be released. The original idea came about 4 years ago, most distro come on 2-4 cd's and most installed a lot of extra programs that aren't needed, but too not install them you have to spend time going through manually and removing the ones you don't want, and then have to install after the installation is finished, all the programs that cannot be placed on the released distro.

But the original plan was not to create a live cd, but to create an installation cd, one that had all my preselected software ready to install and would fit onto a single 700MB cd. I then built a nice graphical interface, similar to redhat's anaconda installer, that was based on GTK+ for nice eye candy.

For the preselected software I used a spare partition and installed from the original slackware 10.0 discs only the softeare that I needed, doing it this way is exactly the same as going through the installation procedure with the boot disc, just is done manually. Once that was completed I tarred and gzipped the whole partition to a single file called base.tar.gz

Now the beauty of a tarred and gzipped file is it's about 1/3 the size of the original. The original install size was about 1.4 GB, after the compression is was about 550MB. My GTK+ based installer ran perfect while an xserver and a desktop like kde,gnome or XFCE4 was running so I grabbed my base.tar.gz and the installer and placed it on a knoppix live dvd to test the installer.

Once that was all working fine I wanting to create my own live dvd rather than using the knoppix dvd. I had to make it a live dvd since I used the original partition I had installed on, and it was about 1.4GB. After that I recompiled a 2.6.17.11 kernel with unionfs and squashfs support so I could use squashfs to compressed the file system on install partition. This would have the same compression ratio and doing a tarred/gzipped file.

Now that has worked I'm going to make the live cd as small as possible, hopefully around 100MB with an xserver so I can go back to the original plan of using a tarred/gzipped file and the installer only.

This is just an brief outline there is also a lot of other little things that go on in the background that I probably forgotten about, it's been ongoing for a few months now, very time consuming, i'm just lucky I have the time at the moment.

Good Day

If you want to create your own distribution..then goto

http://www.gnewsense.org/Builder/How...uxDistribution

It has scripts etc..but you will need a high bandwidth connection

Cheers

That is quiet a project, fotoguy, i can imagine the time consumption involved but it is way over my head. i simply can't get my head around it and the fact that it is extremely time consuming makes it all the more impossible for me to ever go down this road. i need to get it all to work first and then back it up onto a dvd i think and go from there. the difference in your experience level and mine is huge, i can tell by all the actions you have taken to get to the stage where you are now. i must say that i have got a good working system now with kubuntu but i find at times it is harder to configure than mepis when it comes to getting root acces in x for example. for a guy with my level of experience this is a very convenient feature. i try to understand as much as i can, like anyone else, but we are not all experts here, some of us are x users and if x doesn't offer facilities for certain actions we are lost in commandline cyberspace.

then to reply on shawn bisshop's idea i am looking at the site and i see a lot of (for me) dreaded terms and the allmighty command line actions involved. it is just too complicated for me. and my adsl connection is only a marginal 55kb/s download (crawl) speed.

i have now installed SimplyMepis 6.0 with low res (because of another problem) on my machine in a new partition, still running the upgraded SimplyMepis 3.4 (to a Debian flavor because of a messy sources.list)where i can't get nvidia drivers to work because of missing kernel headers and kubuntu dapper with all hardware working fine but with root priviledge problems.(idiot operator). I will install what i want on the SM6.0 installation if i can get nvidia right here because if i start the live cd without boot options selected it will not go into x. problems problems problems! don't know why, it is not that i have the crappiest system in the world, it is a P4 2.4ghz, asus mobo, 80gb and 40gb hd, 512mb ram, 64mb asus 7100 pro vga. pretty standard if you ask me. i don't have these problems with sm60 on other (newer) pc's that i have built and sold.

i will keep on fiddling around, if i ever find a solution that is to a satisfying level for me i will post my actions. thanks all for your help.

ron