That's one of the best ideas I've heard in awhile.I can't count the # of times I've reinstalled various OSes. It's a pain in the *** to have to start from scratch every time and reconfigure everything. I get very meticulous in my setups, so it can take days or weeks to get back to a state of being usable as a daily driver. It gets old, which is part of why i moved away from distro hopping in favor of trying something stable and sticking with it.Consider this - using a 'golden image' you can have a single copy of the OS that will run on all 'classic' computers and you pass it around to whatever you'd like to run that day. You can prepare this image to recognize the particular computer and have it configure appropriately. The notes for this 'how-to' are extensive and can be noted within the image itself.Thanks for your suggestions, I will keep it into due account.
I've never been one to distro hop. I have little interest in the 42 ways to do something. I choose and master one way, my preferred way, and evolve it into this master image. With this way I avoid the install, the laborious configuring, and the gotchas of needless variation. I have no need for any 'branded' software for cloning or backups, just the tidy qemu-img. I machine hop, with a master distro I know like the back of my hand.
Of course I have a few variations. Any of them can be morphed; renamed, re-domained, reconfigured. Typically whatever I'm using to grow, feeling out those 42 ways, will be scraped within a year - with all the important changes saved into a sister copy with none of the daily usage scars. Actually my daily is never up to date since it really doesn't matter - there are many archived copies if I need to backtrack, and typically 2 or more future copies yet to be sullied. A reminder from the forums this weeks - I will soon load up a few 11.8 images and upgrade them just in case.
My i386/i686 is the fattest distro I have. When we glance through its boot history we see a few dozen computers it has lived on. I do clean that up every so often, but leave a condensed record of the inflection points. Its apt history is seven years long now. Every 'new' system is within a half hour of being fully configured, usually using an amd64 skinnier cousin of similar age.
I looked at uefi a few years ago and did some testing. I can't recall, but my notes say it's all possible, and also the most blatant enshittification in all of PC history.
I know you probably won't advise for Windows, since you may or may not use it (I still do, when needed), but how about Linux generally. What's your techniques for making these so called golden images?
Statistics: Posted by Enigma83 — 2024-08-17 00:42 — Replies 16 — Views 619