clone

[stan]

On Fri, 19 Jun 2009 14:30:39 +0100 (BST)
Patrick Dupre <pd520 at york.ac.uk> wrote:

> Thank for your email.
> 
> THis is not what I want. I have a machine installed 6 months ago,
> which has then been enriched by a lot of packages. Now I would like to
> clone the installation. typically I want to pass from i386 to x86_64
> and from FC10 to FC11 expecting to get a similar machine.
> 
I too would like some more automatic way to do such a thing, but have
not found one.  In a sense, preupgrade is doing this, but after a
few uses, it can leave a system with cruft.  And you are using your
main system so if issues arise, there is no alternate system to boot
and do research with.

My solution to this has been to do a minimal install of the new
version, say F11, in its own partition.  Thus I start with a clean
slate. Then, I run 
yum list installed > all-packages.txt 
on the old system.

That gives me a list of all the packages I have installed there.  With a
little script magic, I reformat it into something yum can use for an
install command.  Then I download the everything repository from a
mirror, and make it into a local repository with high priority.  I
then run yum on the list of files from the previous installation (this
can take a long time because of all the dependency checking).  I've
looked at kickstart for doing this, but it seems to be inappropriate
for the job.  In the end, I've just let it run in the background, like
a very long update.  I wonder if I could just run rpm -Uvh --nodeps and
trust that dependencies haven't changed enough between versions to
matter. i.e. all dependencies were resolved on the old system, if I
install those same packages on a new system there should be no
dependency issues.  Seems chancy as I've noticed package names change
and packages are dropped during releases.  And there will be broken
dependencies until everything is installed.

I end with a system that is almost identical to the one I cloned,
needing only a little tweaking to feel just like the old one.