Copying Suse 10.2 Configuration

[enginious]

Hi,

I hope I'm posting in the right forum. I've been using Suse 10.2 for about 3 months now, as a switch from windows, and loving it. After a steep learning curve of configuring and setting it up the way I want it, I cant remember all the steps I took to get it how it is now.

I want to get a second machine and install Suse 10.2 on this one as well, but I was wondering if there's a way to copy the configuration of the current machine, or I guess even backup the entire system and recreate it on a new machine from scratch?

Just as an aside and not quite so important, is there a way to keep files between the 2 machines in sync?

Thanks for any help and advice you can offer.
Cheers,
Sparky.

[bigtomrodney]

There are a few options for you...You can store a configuration when installing from scratch (which is probably too late for you).

Alternatively you can use a tool called Partimage to make a backup of your harddisk and restore it to the harddisk on your new machine. If they have similar hardware you'll be fine, at worst you should have to change your xorg.conf for your graphics config.

I think there was a tool in YaST also for copying configurations but I'm not at my Linux box now. I'll try to check later.

[enginious]

Thanks for your advice, I'll have a deeper look into YaST and see what I can discover.

I've got an old box lying around somewher, so I'll give it a bash and see what happens.

Thanks for replying so quickly,
Cheers,
Sparky.

[valemon]

Just a suggestion. Try installing an other distro (debian mandriva fedora etc). It would be much more interesting...

[framp]

I want to get a second machine and install Suse 10.2 on this one as well, but I was wondering if there's a way to copy the configuration of the current machine, or I guess even backup the entire system and recreate it on a new machine from scratch?

Your question let me start yast and I found something called autoconfiguration. I don't know whether that's helpful. Anyhow - I already cloned a SuSE installation this way:

1) Create a whole system backup with tar
2) Create the same partions as on the source system on the target system
3) Restore the backup
4) Startup the new system and update the networking stuff (ip address if you use static IPs, hostname, ...)
5) SuSE is quite flexible with the hardware - so if you have other hardware on the new system there is a high probability the clone will also start up. You might to have to tweak some HW configs in some case.

Just as an aside and not quite so important, is there a way to keep files between the 2 machines in sync?

There is a nice and powerfull tool called rsync. There are a lot of tools available on top of rsync to hide the complexity.

[enginious]

Hi Framp,

Thanks for responding to my message, much appreciated. I'm looking into the rsync thing now and I'll look for a tool to manage it for me.

Thanks for you help.
Sparky.