MX Linux Forum

Posted: **Sun Dec 20, 2020 5:47 pm**

Hi - I have a better laptop than the one that has my Linux implementation. It's currently Windows 10. I'd like to take the implementation I have on my linux laptop and replicate in the other (not as a dual boot - just pure Linux). Is there a convenient way to do this? I have Timeshift on the current one with the latest snapshot. Is there a way I can use that?

Thanks!

Steve

Posted: **Sun Dec 20, 2020 6:12 pm**

I have done exactly that using MX snapshot. Access it from MX Tools and choose Preserving accounts (for personal backups). It will create an ISO you can than use with LiveUSB Maker to put the system on a USB drive. You can then install to your laptop by booting the with the USB.

Posted: **Sun Dec 20, 2020 10:16 pm**

Hi - I tried that. The systems uses about 13 gigs or so (out of 26G). I have a 64 gig micro-SD card that I selected for the Snapshot location. During the process the image creation process was aborted. Not sure why there wouldn't be enough space, if that's the issue. The 64G SD card was essentially empty. That said, there is a 4G file on the SD card with the name "snapshot-20201220_2150.iso"

Any ideas?

Thanks

https://photos.app.goo.gl/mG2g8Ybznn4nQs5MA

richb wrote: Sun Dec 20, 2020 6:12 pm I have done exactly that using MX snapshot. Access it from MX Tools and choose Preserving accounts (for personal backups). It will create an ISO you can than use with LiveUSB Maker to put the system on a USB drive. You can then install to your laptop by booting the with the USB.

Posted: **Sun Dec 20, 2020 10:45 pm**

You probably didn't exclude the directories in home so it was adding all of your data files to the snapshot. Personal data should be backed up separately, not included in the snapshot iso.

The normal snapshot storage location is /home/snapshot. Unless you're hurting for free space in your root or home partition I suggest using that default. You can delete the snapshot files (as root) to regain the space after burning the iso to tour USB flash drive if you wish.

If you are tight on free space in the root directory that could be where the "not enough space" issue came from as it uses /var/tmp as a working temporary directory when creating the snapshot. If your system partition is nearly full you're probably also having other issues or will have soon, such as not being able to log in. We would need to see your Quick System Info to tell if this is the case.

Posted: **Sun Dec 20, 2020 10:51 pm**

I have never used TimeShift. It may do what you wish?

MX Snapshot is a part of MX. It creates a bootable ISO of your system,
which you can install, in the same manner that you installed the MX release ISO,
but now it will carry over the configuration of your running system.

Sounds as if you created the ISO on your SD card but it needs to be installed on the SD, not just created there.

Apologies if I have misunderstood your issue.

Posted: **Sun Dec 20, 2020 10:56 pm**

richb explained above how to install the new ISO.

Posted: **Sun Dec 20, 2020 11:12 pm**

sbrener wrote: Sun Dec 20, 2020 5:47 pm Hi - I have a better laptop than the one that has my Linux implementation. It's currently Windows 10. I'd like to take the implementation I have on my linux laptop and replicate in the other (not as a dual boot - just pure Linux). Is there a convenient way to do this? I have Timeshift on the current one with the latest snapshot. Is there a way I can use that?

Thanks!

Steve

Let's clarify what you want to do first. When you say you want to replicate the implementation on another machine, are you interested in the various data (e.g. media, music, docs) on your first machine, or just the configurations and settings in your first machine (configs/settings are in /home)?

If the former, is the media saved on a separate drive/partition, or part of your /home?

Assuming all your media and settings are all in /home, perhaps your snapshot stopped generating halfway because you were doing other CPU/RAM intensive stuff on your computer while it was in the midst of creating the snapshot (you did say the first machine wasn't so great). Maybe go make some coffee, do some chores while your machine is making the snapshot?

Also, following on from Richard's post, just save the iso onto your first machine (assuming there is space), then use Live-USB-Maker to create the live USB from the iso.

Posted: **Mon Dec 21, 2020 12:41 am**

Also be aware that many newer laptops can only do BIOS flashes to newer versions from within Windows, so you might want to do your research about your better computer before getting rid of Windows entirely. Sometimes newer BIOS versions are marked as being critical updates as they can fix vulnerabilities or system issues, so you would need a way to update yours. Very few BIOSes have a built-in flashing utility anymore and very few manufacturers provide a stand-alone utility that can be run on a bootable USB stick like they used to do.

Posted: **Mon Dec 21, 2020 2:50 am**

sbrener wrote: Sun Dec 20, 2020 10:16 pm Hi - I tried that. The systems uses about 13 gigs or so (out of 26G). I have a 64 gig micro-SD card that I selected for the Snapshot location. During the process the image creation process was aborted. Not sure why there wouldn't be enough space, if that's the issue. The 64G SD card was essentially empty. That said, there is a 4G file on the SD card with the name "snapshot-20201220_2150.iso"

Any ideas?

Thanks

https://photos.app.goo.gl/mG2g8Ybznn4nQs5MA

richb wrote: Sun Dec 20, 2020 6:12 pm I have done exactly that using MX snapshot. Access it from MX Tools and choose Preserving accounts (for personal backups). It will create an ISO you can than use with LiveUSB Maker to put the system on a USB drive. You can then install to your laptop by booting the with the USB.

The image doesn't give me a good idea what was going on, if you could PM me the logfile /var/mx-snapshot.log I could check to see if there's some error in the program. As other people mentioned maybe it's a matter of exclusion if you included /home and have a lot of files it might not work.

Posted: **Mon Dec 21, 2020 6:15 am**

As others have pointed out one needs to ensure the location of the iSO has enough room to hold it. The ISO itself can be quite large. Mine is 43.8 GiB. Of course the smaller the better, a faster creation process and less of a restriction on where written to.

Posted: **Mon Dec 21, 2020 8:10 am**

I did just send the log file to Adrian. But, here's a little background. The laptop I'm using has a small SSD - about 26G or so, about half of which is the OS and programs (has about 13G free) - so, I'm wondering if it needs to create it in the tmp file first maybe it's not big enough unless it uses a lot of compression. I save my data files on an external 64G SD card; they wouldn't be created in the snapshot. The other laptop is 1TB, but it is an HDD - I decided that I'm going to do a dual boot on that one instead of making it pure Linux. Here's the log file

Thanks

Code: Select all

2020-12-20 22:12:56.072 DBG default: mx-snapshot version: 20.12
2020-12-20 22:12:56.203 DBG default: mountpoint -q /live/aufs
2020-12-20 22:12:56.215 DBG default: /usr/bin/lslogins --noheadings -u -o user | grep -vw root
2020-12-20 22:12:56.233 DBG default: "sbrener"
2020-12-20 22:12:56.235 DBG default: uname -m
2020-12-20 22:12:56.243 DBG default: "x86_64"
2020-12-20 22:12:56.244 DBG default: cat /etc/debian_version | /usr/bin/cut -f1 -d'.'
2020-12-20 22:12:56.256 DBG default: "10"
2020-12-20 22:12:56.258 DBG default: +++ void MainWindow::setup() +++
2020-12-20 22:12:56.340 DBG default: +++ void MainWindow::loadSettings() +++
2020-12-20 22:12:56.341 DBG default: +++ QString MainWindow::getFilename() +++
2020-12-20 22:12:56.342 DBG default: +++ void MainWindow::listFreeSpace() +++
2020-12-20 22:12:56.342 DBG default: df -h "/home" | /usr/bin/awk 'NR==2 {print $4}'
2020-12-20 22:12:56.661 DBG default: "13G"
2020-12-20 22:12:56.668 DBG default: +++ QString MainWindow::getSnapshotSize() +++
2020-12-20 22:12:56.668 DBG default: +++ int MainWindow::getSnapshotCount() +++
2020-12-20 22:12:56.669 DBG default: df -h / | /usr/bin/awk 'NR==2 {print $3}'
2020-12-20 22:12:56.755 DBG default: "13G"
2020-12-20 22:12:56.757 DBG default: mountpoint -q /home

Posted: **Mon Dec 21, 2020 12:58 pm**

It looks like Adrian called it (via PM)....my SD card was formatted for fat32. I just reformatted for ext4 and it seems to have completed successfully. Now to make a bootable USB. Not out of the woods yet, but hopefully no more snags. Thanks all for your input.

Posted: **Mon Dec 21, 2020 1:16 pm**

I do not know about your hardware.
What I do is make sure the new drive is bigger than the one I have in the old machine. Then remove the drive from the new machine and put it in the old machine (if you do not have a drive slot to connect you can use a remote drive to usb converter). Then while running a live session on the old computer I run as root dd if=/dev/old-drive of=/dev/new-drive status=progress. Then put the new drive back in the new computer. Make sure the bios is using the same drive protocol. (ahci usually IIRC) then make sure it boots. If it boots, I then reboot into a live session and expand the partition with gparted.

If your new drive is smaller then I make a backup of the old drive, shrink the old drive partition to a size smaller than the new drive, dd the first bit of the hard drive over, then dd the partitions over and expand. I think you can also dd the whole drive over to the new one as well with a flag to tell it to stop at a certain size.

You could also re-partition the new drive as you like, rsync the files from the old drive to the new drive, then install the drive and live boot the new computer and run "boot repair", reboot on the new machine.

Posted: **Mon Dec 21, 2020 2:47 pm**

richb wrote: Mon Dec 21, 2020 6:15 am As others have pointed out one needs to ensure the location of the iSO has enough room to hold it. The ISO itself can be quite large. Mine is 43.8 GiB. Of course the smaller the better, a faster creation process and less of a restriction on where written to.

Actually you need twice the size of the iso file. We first make the linuxfs file which holds the compressed file system then we make the iso which includes a copy of that file. Depending on the type of compression used, the creation of linuxfs is usually the slowest step by a fair margin.

Posted: **Tue Dec 22, 2020 3:59 pm**

Well folks, after hours and hours updating to the latest Win10 implementation and defragging the HDD on the second laptop, I was able to do an install for a dual boot of MX Linux and Win10 on this machine with a lot more storage and ram....but, regrettably an HDD instead of SDD, so, it is slow, although much quicker in Linux than Windows, which is painfully slow.

Thanks for all your help!

Steve

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Replicating mx linux on another laptop

Replicating mx linux on another laptop

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