Ghosting on Linux

[Janet]

I would like to be able to take the system that Ive set up (only the settings and downloaded/installed software not data) and copy to the same system on another computer.
I understand this is called ghosting. Is this possible to do on Linux Mandrake 8.0 ??

[phazeman]

This is very interesting question,and i realy would like to have an answer about, but as i see, noone actually answered, so i wrote this message to bring it to the top of the list again (sorry)

[teeitup]

Norton Ghost is an all or nothing program.
It is designed to make images of entire disks or partitions. If you are moving to a new system your kernel and modules could be a problem due to different hardware.

The dd command will also make exact copies of
media. As far as I know it doesn't offer compression of any kind. You need equivilent space to store/copy data to.

When moving to a new system "tar" works well.
The tar command can be highly customized to do exactly what you want. It also works well in single user mode in order to restore data.

These are options for moving data, not solutions. Your solution might be different than mine. Different people will have different solutions based on their needs and expertise.

If you want more help, provide more detailed information.

Good Luck,

[d23]

Ghost is a great program and yes, it does compression and it's pretty good about it. It's compression is very fast and nice and tight. You should be able to ghost Linux partitions with Ghost but as for moving them to another computer, I'd make damn sure it's waking up in a computer with the exact same hardware. Linux could probably wake up fine and just reconfigure itself, but best not to take that risk.