Duplicating installed system to a new one
 

Basically I want to duplicate the installation from my old machine to my new machine.

I started with a fresh install of 12.2 and then updated everything from there that has had a patch released for it.

For shared partitions, I have used dd to backup the data, but I am stuck on how to best make sure that all of the custom packages I compiled get installed on the new machine.

I would like to install everything as it was on my old machine. There are quite a few SBo and other packages that I compiled and installed though. What is the easiest way for me to install these on the new machine? I am thinking I can copy the packages in the /tmp folder on the old machine (I never deleted the packages once I ran the slackbuilds) and then install them. Is this the right way to go about it, or is there a better way?

That's what I do. I have a desktop and a laptop both running the same version of Slackware. I usually make the Slackware packages (either from SlackBuild scripts or using src2pkg) on the desktop and then copy them to the laptop. Use installpkg or upgradepkg to install them and you'll be ready to go.

If you've got both computers running at the same time, and they're connected, you could potentially use rsync to synchronize the two versions of your home directories.

Regards,

-Drew

I always install and configure Slackware on the first machine and then I clone my installation on the other machines. I use regular tar czf backup-copy.tgz to store the root partition and tar xzf backup.copy.tgz to restore it on the other machines. To do it I run my machines using Slax. Finally I customize fstab and lilo.conf on the second and the third machines. In result I have on all my machines the same system using the same configuration.