MX-Snapshot = Awesome Tool

[deanr72]

Yesterday I decided I'd better get my back-up PC in order just in case - it is my back-up, after all!

So, I downloaded the mx-plasma iso and created a live boot USB - but then I remembered the mx-snapshot tool and thought to myself: "Hang on, why not give that a go?"

It took approx. 8 mins to create the iso from my daily driver and then about 5 mins to create the bootable USB (approx. 10 GB in size) but everything was going surprisingly smoothly nonetheless. And then it even booted trouble-free into an exact clone of my workhorse. Sweet!

I had to hunt around a little online to find out that I needed to type 'minstall' into terminal to get the installer to start up but, beyond that, what an absolute marvel!

So, I just wanted to say - thanks again all for a wonderful MX-KDE and the wonderful MX-tools. It's a delight and a wonder!

[linexer2016]

Yesterday I decided I'd better get my back-up PC in order just in case - it is my back-up, after all!

So, I downloaded the mx-plasma iso and created a live boot USB - but then I remembered the mx-snapshot tool and thought to myself: "Hang on, why not give that a go?"

It took approx. 8 mins to create the iso from my daily driver and then about 5 mins to create the bootable USB (approx. 10 GB in size) but everything was going surprisingly smoothly nonetheless. And then it even booted trouble-free into an exact clone of my workhorse. Sweet!

I had to hunt around a little online to find out that I needed to type 'minstall' into terminal to get the installer to start up but, beyond that, what an absolute marvel!

So, I just wanted to say - thanks again all for a wonderful MX-KDE and the wonderful MX-tools. It's a delight and a wonder!

That's great that it works well for you deanr72. I am a bit bemused by your statement that you had to hunt around for minstall. Do you mean to first use MX Snapshot or something else because if the former, I am not aware that you should need to do other than run the snapshot/liveusb routines from MX Tools.

[asqwerth]

WHen you create a snapshot of your existing system and run it live, often the "install" icon doesn't show up on the desktop. In such event, you start the installer by using the terminal command.

[linexer2016]

WHen you create a snapshot of your existing system and run it live, often the "install" icon doesn't show up on the desktop. In such event, you start the installer by using the terminal command.

I mainly use the snapshot/liveusb methodologies as a fallback backup. That's to say, if disaster struck with my primary system, I'd have something there to restore things easily. This along with Timeshift gives me the comfort of a safety net. The appearance of non-appearance of the install icon does not concern me in these circumstances.

[m_pav]

I think the install icon only shows up with a snapshot if remaster-general is used. Remaster-personal is reading the desktop settings integrated from the active user as at the time the snapshot was taken so it's very unlikely they'd have an install icon on their desktop.

[Adrian]

I think the install icon only shows up with a snapshot if remaster-general is used. Remaster-personal is reading the desktop settings integrated from the active user as at the time the snapshot was taken so it's very unlikely they'd have an install icon on their desktop.

I add the .desktop file on all the users found on system, so it would be weird to be missing, but I did forget to add it in /etc/skel/Desktop for new users so that is probably what is missing in general snapshot if the general snapshot is not taken from a live environment that does have that /etc/skel/Desktop/Installer.desktop file. I fixed that in the new release, so this issue should disappear.

BTW, the new release is almost ready, it needs some testing, it has a nice feature: being able to run it completely from CLI (think headless server, or computer where the Desktop is not working for some reason)
64bit last build if any wants to try: https://github.com/MX-Linux/mx-snapshot ... _amd64.deb

For how to use CLI type -h or --help for info. Some are not obvious options, ask me for clarifications (for example I use -m for creating monthly snapshot, you can ignore that option for now)

[Peter Kuykendall]

BTW, the new release is almost ready, it needs some testing, it has a nice feature: being able to run it completely from CLI (think headless server, or computer where the Desktop is not working for some reason)
64bit last build if any wants to try: https://github.com/MX-Linux/mx-snapshot ... _amd64.deb

For how to use CLI type -h or --help for info. Some are not obvious options, ask me for clarifications (for example I use -m for creating monthly snapshot, you can ignore that option for now)

That sounds great. My use case is we manually build a "golden image", then use Clonezilla to duplicate the disk contents to a fresh machine (via PXE boot). In the cases where the fresh machine has a different chipset, we need to have a CLI tool to restore the snapshot, during which it discovers the fresh machine's hardware and installs the appropriate drivers.

At (CLI) boot we are running MX, just not X, presumably due to the different video chipset. Can I use minstall from the CLI to restore the snapshot? If so, how do I invoke it? I tried running 19.3 64 bit minstall from the command line but got "Could not connect to any X display", which is to be expected if it's trying to run in X. The link quoted is 404. Any advice is appreciated!

Thanks!

[Adrian]

That by now is an old build, just use the one from the repo.
Minstall doesn't work in CLI, I think there's an antix cli installer but I've never used it, it's probably better to fix the display issue, probably not too hard. You might need to edit or remove /etc/X11/Xorg.conf

[Peter Kuykendall]

UPDATE: Issue was solved by adding the boot parameter "from=all". I'm keeping this post here in hopes it may help somebody else with the same problem.

Thanks Adrian. I'm now taking a different approach, storing the snapshot on the hard drive (it's under 3 GB), and making a GRUB menu entry to launch it when I want to do a restore. This should allow us to distribute laptops without USB sticks, as they are a hassle for us to manage, especially across many users in many places. It has a lot of promise, but gets stuck after it boots from the /antiX/vmlinuz and /antiX/initrd files. It can't find /antiX/linuxfs because it's not looking for it on the hard drive. I can't figure out how to point it there. Any ideas?

I can put the snapshot files on a separate partition (e.g. sda2), so when it is restored (e.g. to sda1) it doesn't clobber itself .

In order to extract the files I mounted the snapshot ISO and copied the contents of the antiX folder to /antiX. linuxfs is in there. I'm hoping there's some boot or kernel directive I can append to a line in GRUB that points it to /antiX/linuxfs (e.g. to search all block devices, or at least /dev/sda1). It's currently restricting its search to USB and CD devices only. Any ideas?

Contents of /etc/grub.d/40_custom

Code: Select all

menuentry "MX Linux reinstall" {

linux /antiX/vmlinuz
initrd /antiX/initrd.gz
}

Here's the output, manually copied from my test VM's screen (ugh)

Code: Select all

Current boot codes:
  BOOT_IMAGE=/antiX/vmlinux
Loading hardware specific modules . . .
Scan usb,cd devices.  Look for boot file(s) antiX/linuxfs
Filtered devices  /dev/sr0
Retry for 15 seconds . . . . . 

Fatal Error
Could not find file antiX/linuxfs
  Searched devices: /dev/sr0
    Searched types : usb,cd
 All block devices: /dev/sr0 /dev/sda2 /dev/sda1 /dev/sda

Please contact BitJam at https://mxlinux.org

Screenshot: https://photos.app.goo.gl/gzN57RrvVth1Yd4AA
I looked up BitJam's posts and it says he hasn't been active for a few months.

Thanks!

[Michael-IDA]

Hi @Adrian,

Sorry to bug you with a newbie question, but I don’t exactly know where to start, so I’m looking for a pointer on where to start reading from.

I’d like to create an .iso like the MX one, that someone could create a Live USB from that contains these things:

- MX w/ Xfce
- Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE)
- the "install" icon

I’d be building this in an Oracle VM (not sure if that’s important). I’ve built a tde.pm (for MXPI) before, which worked fairly well for the TDE group, but several people on their list have indicated interest in being able to just ‘click’ install (which is really convenient) and have MX with both the Xfce and TDE desktops installed.

Snapshot? Live USB Maker? Remaster {the MX Live USB?}?

tl;dr: Where should a newbie start reading on how to create a distributable Live USB based on MX?

Thanks,
Michael

Ref:
MX Linux Trinity Repository Installation Instructions