Important notice

Because this repository has not seen any activity in more than two years, it has been archived by the Louvain-li-Nux team in november 2019. It is now read-only, but you can still fork it. The terms of licence still apply.

LLnux-clone

This set of scripts provides a way to clone an install of a linux distribution.

Warning: these scripts have not been tested thoroughly. They are very fragile and there are a lot of hardcoded paths. Expect this to ruin your data. All commands are dangerous !

Required conditions to work

There should be only two storage devices in the machine: the disk with the install, as /dev/sda, with the partition that will be cloned as /dev/sda1. The other one should be the USB stick on which the clone is made (content of it will be wiped).
The linux distro should use GRUB.
Tested on Ubuntu x86_64 (adapt tinycore files for 32bits, untested).
USB stick should be big enough (5GB for a basic ubuntu install).
The USB stick should be recognized as /dev/sdb.
The hardware of both machine should be the same (or at least similar).

Usecase (and design goals) for these scripts

clone a manually customized OS
ease (and speed) of usage
simplicity
require few to no maintenance
be usable without network infrastructure

Process

Naming

Host system: system that will be cloned.
Portable system: a system installed on the USB stick
Destination system: the system installed on the other computer, will be identical to the host system.

Overview

The scripts are added on the host
Tiny core linux (TCL) is installed on the USB stick
Boot TCL
From TCL, copy content of the host's / partition on the USB stick (as a .tar.lz4)
Boot TCL on the destination system, format and copy content from USB stick to HDD (there is then a chroot step for fixing GRUB and hostname).

Steps

On the host: Add some files to the host system (files of tinycore linux), by running the following commands as root (!! there are some commands to edit).

# Set BASE_DIR to the root of this git repo
BASE_DIR=THE_ROOT_OF_THIS_REPO # EDIT THIS LINE
# Create files for tinycore linux
mkdir -p /opt/tcl/boot/grub
cp $BASE_DIR/vmlinuz64 /opt/tcl/boot/
cp $BASE_DIR/corepure64.gz /opt/tcl/boot/
cp -r $BASE_DIR/tce /opt/tcl
cat > /opt/tcl/boot/grub/grub.cfg <<EOF
search --no-floppy --label --set=root "TCLROOT"
menuentry "Core" {
linux /boot/vmlinuz64 quiet waitusb=5
initrd /boot/corepure64.gz
}
EOF
# copy scripts for use in TCL
mkdir -p /opt/tcl/scripts
for i in $(ls $BASE_DIR/tcl_scripts); do cp $BASE_DIR/tcl_scripts/$i /opt/tcl/scripts/$i; done
for i in $(ls /opt/tcl/scripts); do chmod 755 /opt/tcl/scripts/$i; done

# copy script to prepare usb drive
cp $BASE_DIR/tclusb.sh /usr/local/bin/
chmod 700 /usr/local/bin/tclusb.sh

Plug the USB stick
On the host: run a script to install the portable system on a USB stick: execute the following command

YOUR ENTER SUPER-DANGER ZONE

sudo /usr/local/bin/tclusb.sh

Boot on the USB stick, connected to the host machine.
Run, it will copy the host system to the USB stick.

sudo /mnt/sdb1/scripts/load-install.sh

Boot the portable system on the destination machine, and run, it will install the copy of the host system to the destination machine.

sudo /mnt/sdb1/scripts/write-install.sh

License

These scripts are under license Apache 2.0. See LICENSE.

louvainlinux/llnux-clone