[LUAU] Open Source Ghosting

[Hawaii Linux Institute]

Nathan A. Keirn wrote:

>Actually I guess this is where my Windows Administrative knowledge will come
>in. All ghost does Windows wise is run sysprep, sysprep is a free utility
>that is part of W2k and XP. Sysprep allows you to enter License key, Net
>Bios, and basically everything else that is entered during setup. So from
>what we know now this would be very easy, make a hard drive image of a
>windows install that had sysprep run on it, but no information entered. This
>would give us a generic Windows install install that would be unique for
>every machine it was loaded on.
>
I have been using "cp" to clone my Linux partitions.  Of course, "cp" 
doesn't format the disk, nor does it copy the boot sector.  But these 
are relatively trivial matters.  A smart script probably also has to 
take care of modifying, if necessary, the fstab file.  But as MonMotha 
mentioned, cloning a Linux system is a very easy/flexible matter, and 
eventually the world will realize that this is one of the biggest 
advantages of Linux vis-a-vis Windows.

Another advantage of Linux over Windows is that I can clone a Linux 
partition on the same hard disc, AND easily boot into either or any of 
the Linux partitions.  Indeed, I have multiple clones of a multiplicity 
of Linuxes, each and every one is bootable, on the same hard disc.  The 
command "cp" works for me b/c I never use hard linking.  But I wonder 
how ghost or DriveCopy/DriveImage handles hard linking?

With Windows, since I only have a minimum need, what I did was to use 
Win4Lin to reduce the entire Windows partition to a file and run my 
Windows applications in Linux.  With this setup, cloning of Windows is 
no more than a single cp command.  Recently, however, Win4Lin seems to 
have problems with the 2.6.7 kernel.  Perhaps it's time to get rid of 
Windows for good.  (But a open-sources Ghost clone for Windows is still 
a great idea and I will be more than happy to beta btest it.)  wayne