MX Linux Forum

Hi, can someone please explain to me how MX Snapshot works?
Can I create a snaphost, create a usb boot and install on a new machine?
The old machine is Lenovo, the new one is HP or is it better to reinstall and set everything up again?
Thanks

honzap000 wrote: Sun Mar 10, 2024 7:18 am Hi, can someone please explain to me how MX Snapshot works?
Can I create a snaphost, create a usb boot and install on a new machine?
The old machine is Lenovo, the new one is HP or is it better to reinstall and set everything up again?
Thanks

The snapshot tool effectively clones your current setup as an ISO which can be written to a USB drive. It is computer brand agnostic, so you can use it to install MX on any capable PC. Depending on what content you want to include in the snapshot, it can take quite some time to complete. Therefore, it could be much quicker to do a fresh install and then copy data over from a backup.

It's not huge, but there are a few apps and settings that took me a while to set up, I lose a few hours of setup when I reinstall. But then again, I don't want to transfer any settings specific to the old hardware to the new system.
When booting the mx snapshot and then installing it, is the new system installed and then all the applications and settings or only copy from snapshot?

Whatever is in the snapshot is installed. So if you have installed applications you’ll get those. If you want to preserve all your settings do a personal snapshot which will also save the user account & home folder. The installer will skip user creation when a personal snapshot is detected since the user already exists.

honzap000 wrote: Sun Mar 10, 2024 8:29 am... don't want to transfer any settings specific to the old hardware to the new system...

Yes, just install it as if you were installing a downloaded MX / any distro iso.

It'll pick the drivers according to the current (new) pc (hardware). Won't save/ask/compare how it was previously (even the partitioning and scheme and whether it was encrypted or not), you can do them all anew according to your liking (no matter how it was previously). The only rule is that (naturally) not 64bit iso to an 32 bit architecture .

However, if your new hardware is so new that it needs the latest kernel (I assume the MX on your old hardware is using the standard kernel), you may need to install the latest AHS or Liquorix kernel on your old system (even if you aren't going to use it there), then make your snapshot iso (also assume that you are using the "personal snapshot" option) and create the live usb.

That way, when you boot from usb on the new hardware, you can choose the new kernel.

I did that when I got my laptop some years ago. At that time, the then-standard kernel on MX (running on my PC) was too old to have the drivers for the laptop's network card. But the Liquorix kernel was new enough.

On my part, as a very impressed user of said tool already some years now, I encourage you to try it and see how it works! Only if you have a huge amount of stuff you'd like to carry over (projects, data files etc.) it probably wouldn't be that pertinent to pack all of that into an ISO and waiting it out, heh (just like j2mcgreg pointed out) - but all those other musings you had about it, the dissimilar hardware and so on, I'd say just go for it! It's a fantastic tool, and one of the absolute main technical highlights of MX Linux.

I've installed a custom system from an ISO made using MX Snapshot on wildly different computers, including a fifteen year old laptop, equally old desktop system, and a load of more modern desktops and laptops. This is of course anecdotal, and your mileage may vary, but in my case each and every one of those installations went perfectly, and the system adapted to work on all those different hardware configurations beautifully. If you happen to encounter some issues, for example on older or very new hardware, one of the first things to try would be to switch to a possibly more suitable kernel, as has already been mentioned, too. Basically, I'm not saying anything that new here; just pointing out that I'm a fan, and that it's a super fine utility, lol

Yes, all of the above, and to add - or clarify.
It is an iso, treat it almost like any other linux distro iso you'd install, with one exception - as mentioned.

The official and original MX iso contains many "drivers", so if you removed any of those in you current system - likely for reasons specific to you computer – then obviously they wouldn't be available in another computer than might require those. They could have been removed manually, or with one of the package managers, or MX-Cleanup → "Remove unused wifi drivers", or possibly commented out using the MX-Snapshot > Edit exclusion file.

Take this with a grain of salt because I'm not really sure, but I believe that some have had problems when not excluding certain directories if the files were large, i.e. the home desktop folders. Maybe it was just because the files were extremely large – don’t know.

And for yourself, personal.

honzap000 wrote: Sun Mar 10, 2024 7:18 am Hi, can someone please explain to me how MX Snapshot works?

I suggest you try making a snapshot ISO and then boot it as a live session to see if it works how you'd want it to work on the new hardware. You don't have to install it if you choose not to do so.

MXRobo wrote: Sun Mar 10, 2024 12:30 pm The official and original MX iso contains many "drivers", so if you removed any of those in you current system - likely for reasons specific to you computer – then obviously they wouldn't be available in another computer than might require those. They could have been removed manually, or with one of the package managers, or MX-Cleanup → "Remove unused wifi drivers", or possibly commented out using the MX-Snapshot > Edit exclusion file.

Take this with a grain of salt because I'm not really sure, but I believe that some have had problems when not excluding certain directories if the files were large, i.e. the home desktop folders. Maybe it was just because the files were extremely large – don’t know.

Drivers that got removed can be added back, and most of the important ones you'll need to make sure you get working video, keyboard, and mouse aren't easily removable. The most likely drivers to be missing from a snapshot are, as pointed out here, wifi drivers whose kernel modules were removed from a system that didn't need them.

You can also choose not to include the files in your home directory. So if you have a machine set up how you like it but you don't want to clone, say, your music collection, you can leave it out of the snapshot and that will help make the ISO smaller, too.

Oh, another thing: if you are so inclined, experimenting with all this in a virtual machine is a nice way to try things out, without doing anything to your current actual installed system. You can try creating snapshots and booting from them on actual hardware (if you transfer the resulting ISO from the virtual machine and write it onto a USB stick) and so on. It's good practice in this sort of thing, that is, if you are interested in this to that extent :)

Thank you all very much! It is very beneficial for me.
Mainly I was worried that when installing from snapshot iso some unnecessary software from the "old" laptop where the snapshot was created would not be installed and then there would be no unnecessary problems/slowdown.