Linux Should Be Easier To Clone

Posted by VISITOR on Jan 21, 2006 4:45 PM EDT
; By SuperMike
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If grep, tee, cat, man and commands like it are standard issue UNIX and Linux commands, why has it taken all these years and no one has made a command for cloning these systems so popular that one would not even guess of a system having this or not?

I'm a rabid fan of Linux after switching to it about 4 years ago. I now use Ubuntu as my primary desktop at home and office. I do some bit of PHP/PostgreSQL projects on it and love that platform more so than I do Microsoft .NET.

However, why is it that cloning a Linux system is not an inherent, built-in part of the command line? Why is there not an easy to use command-line tool that's part of the standard Linux build (much like grep is) that permits anyone to clone a Linux image onto another system? It would be great if I could put a floppy or USB key drive in a system, boot from it, type some commands or single command, and it would download an image instantly from another Linux system that I can assign to host it. Then, I reboot this new clone when it's done and voila -- it's finished, ready for me to implement further changes. And I don't mean something experimental from SourceForge -- I'd like to see something built into to most Linux OSes. It seems such a fundamental thing that I'm surprised it was not created years and years ago, much like grep was. Don't you agree?

Right now in my office, we built this fantastic online timecard kiosk system using IBM kiosks. However, we are not able to easily replicate this image across other kiosks because of this deficiency.

In fact, I would even be happy if I could install a standard Ubuntu Linux on one system, connect it to the network, and then tell it to replicate an image from another system. But even that is not so easy.

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Subject Topic Starter Replies Views Last Post
dd? crusadingknight 5 6,090 Jan 22, 2006 7:09 PM
Altiris works with Linux devnet 0 1,842 Jan 22, 2006 2:32 PM
Does any system copy itself? peragrin 4 2,179 Jan 22, 2006 12:59 PM
chroot ... timlinux 0 1,663 Jan 22, 2006 1:24 AM
Cloning a Linux box Gem 0 2,411 Jan 22, 2006 1:07 AM

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