How to take a snapshot of my current TC? Is that remastering?

[baz]

I have setup my perfect, super-fast, minimal and beautiful TC for my EEE PC 901, with:

- All wireless setup and working including WPA
- Sound, Video, OpenBox, Tint2 Panel, VLC, Shiretoko (Light firefox), PCManFM, Leafpad
- Visual and behavioral customization of WBAR and the desktop
- Persistent (non-cloud) storage of /opt, /home, /tce ont he EEE's second drive

I would like to save my whole setup including all programs and configurations to be able to easily give to someone or install on another computer. How can I do this? Is this what remastering is in the wiki?

[baz]

Any word on this? The wiki says how to remaster but not exactly what it is, what it's for and what the limitations are.

[baz]

After reading lots of the forum, I found this comment by danielibarnes to be most informative:

There is often confusion about remastering vs. extensions. There are very few cases where you need to remaster, namely to:

    * Rebuild the kernel to enable/disable options
    * Include modules for hardware required to boot (HDD controllers, for example)
    * Build a self-contained TC CD for a specific purpose (appliance).
    * Include or modify files which are used before extensions are loaded (like /etc/inittab)

In short, you only need to remaster for something that is needed before extensions are loaded. Everything else can go into an extension. Keep in mind that an extension in its simplest case (.tce) is just a tar.gz which is extracted to the root filesystem at bootup. If you want to add programs or modify the filesystem, follow the wiki guidelines for creating an extension. That is the real strength of TC, and it will serve you well.

There are a lot of downsides to remastering, namely, not being able to update anything without re-remastering.

[JoXo009]

What you intend to do seems to be mirroring your install process.

To my knowledge that would mean to create an automated install script what isn't trivial at all. Remastering would create similar difficulties.

If your friend have got a usual machine with more than some hundred MB RAM and their own system running there is another possibility.

Download Sun's Virtual Box, install your system there (starting Virtual Box with TC iso mounted as CD and then following the installation guide) shutdown the Virtual Box and share the Virtual Box VDI file with your friends.

They only have to install Sun's Virtual Box, start it with your VDI file and will have exactly the same install as you do.

[baz]

What I really want to do is share my perfectly setup TC for the EEE with my buddies who have EEE's but have zero knowledge of anything computers. I can't have them drop to the command line, or figure out drivers or anything like that. My system has all that setup as well as the right gui apps that I know they would enjoy using. How would you suggest I share this with them? Is a rebuild script the way to go in this case? Or a remaster? Or just making custom extensions?

[curaga]

If you have the usb stick ready, with the desired extensions and backup, just make an image of that usb stick.

dd if=/dev/sda of=myimage

Replace sda with your usb stick device. This image may be applied to an usb stick within windows with one of the rawrite tools, some of them graphical. The destination usb stick has to be at least the size of your source stick.

edit: Ah, I missed it was on the SSD. Well, in that case, just put in a usb stick, format ext2, and copy everything there. And make it bootable. This would make it easy for other Eee users to try it.

Installing it would be just copying everything to the hard drive, and making it boot. In the linux eee's it's just adding a grub entry.