Easy way to package my system??

I am running openSUSE and have gotten beryl installed and working and a few other changes. Is there an easy way to just package the whole thing so the next time I re-install or hand it off to a friend or something they can just install it and it is all loaded up with the changes I've made?

Thanks
-0cer

Are you saying you want to just basically ghost the entire drive?

this is for ubuntu but it may work as long as you can boot from a live CD

http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/partimage

I have used it and restored with it, works great

Nice GTengineer, I will check that out.

What do you guys think of this: http://en.opensuse.org/LiveDVD I was reading up on it and so far can't really tell if this will accomplish what I am trying to do or not.

There are two ways I can see that working -- either you ghost the entire drive like MRD said, or create a modified installation. A custom liveCD is great, but isn't much good for you if it doesn't provide the capability to install itself onto the host computer -- I don't know if the openSUSE liveCD allows that.

Probably the easiest way to package it without resorting to a full ghost (need lots of storage, specific to your system including user/pass) is to do an install, then have some system that keeps track of changes as you install the apps you want, and set your configuration up. One possibility is to make some sort of backup just as you finish the base install, then do the rest and make an incremental backup -- this will have only the things that changed, which it seems is what you're most interested in.

Usually ghosting a new install isn't bad, because basic packages don't take up much room, it's the media files that eat up our hard drives. At least that's true for me. I can run most of my comps comfortably off a 6 gb drive, it's the media that eats space (which I run off a file server).

Linux is also very easy to ghost. It's not picky about being in certain sector or anything. Just copy the files from one drive to another using cp and it's happy.

dd can make and image of whole drive or just a partition then there is tar both these work and are standard on all linux distros

Those can also be combined with gzip or bzip2 to compress the tarball or the dd image in order to use less space.

The major issue I have with dd (aside from the fact that it'll image everything, including free space) is that it makes it impossible to image a 6GB (4GB free) partition onto a 3GB partition unless you know that the last 6000000 physical sectors on the 6GB drive are unallocated. That's if the filesystem doesn't encode its size when it's created (don't know the details on this one -- anybody who knows their stuff care to shed some light?)