In one of the previous post i described how to get the Atheros wifi card of a Acer Aspire 5315 to run correctly under Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04.

That was the biggest issue and got resolved, plus i also noticed that Ubuntu was running like a charm on these machines. So why not wipe out the whole Linpus installation ?

Redid the whole process altogether with the ndiswrapper procedure. Got Skype and aMsn to correctly work with sound and video from the builtin webcam. So it’s all peaches. The only thing is that i have to do this procedure for all laptops now.

In the past, throughout a friends recommendation i was using Mondoarchive/Mondorestore to backup systems.
Fact is though, that is was always able to unzip these iso’s within the OS but never able to do a full system restore from the boot on.

During the research for another solution, i came across Remastersys.
Tiny little application with a bunch of features to backup and restore your current installation, make live cd’s based on your filesystem and other tricks of this nature.

To get it running edit your /etc/apt/sources.lst file and add the following to the bottom:


deb http://www.remastersys.klikit-linux.com/repository remastersys/


Save and close. Update the sources and install the package:


sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install remastersys


Here’s a snippet from the remastersys manpage:


SYNOPSIS
remastersys backup|clean|dist [cdfs|iso] [filename.iso]
remastersys backup
remastersys clean
remastersys dist

OPTIONS
backup Makes a complete system backup including the user folders.
clean Cleans the temporary build directory.
dist Makes system backup minus the user folders.

So basically, what i needed to back this system up was :

sudo remastersys dist

This creates customdist.iso image in /home/remastersys/remastersys.
After checking and burning the image,

sudo remastersys clean

to clean up all temporary files.

Boot up this newly burned cd and Ubuntu will be installed with all the specs of the backed up system.
Including installed software, drivers, configurations and so on.
The only thing that is not part of this backup are useraccounts.

Even with the last little detail, for me this was the most smooth working solution in found.