In the *buntu world, aptik is a marvellous utility program “for migrating system settings and data to a fresh install of a Ubuntu-based distribution. It can be used while re-installing or upgrading to the next Ubuntu/Linux Mint release”. In my usage it’s especially useful for automating the installation of all the same programs on PC-B as you might already have on PC-A. http://www.teejeetech.in/p/aptik.html
Can anyone pls tell me if something similar exists in the openSUSE Tumbleweed world? Note - i’m not talking merely about programs to back up a User’s data; that’s comparatively trivial, & different.
Thank you. No, i’d not known of it before. I installed it direct from main repos, in one of my testing VMs just to look at it. I suspect it’s probably a bit above my head unfortunately — aptik is nice for amateurs like me due to its comfy GUI
Well yes, i’m quite sure that i am bonkers. Thanks for the link; it looks interesting. Initially i thought it still couldn’t help me as i misunderstood, thinking it only produced a static listing of what my system currently is. I became rather interested though once i read:
Service migration
Migrate your services from one kind of system to another. Migrate physical systems to the cloud. Migrate from one operating system version to another. Do this in a repeatable, documented way, which can be adapted to your needs.
…which is the entire point of Aptik, & what i seek here now in openSUSE… a way to automate or at least semi-automate the process of me being able to mimic my setup on a different pc, without having to manually install every package myself, the second time. I shall need to study Machinery more, to decide if it really might satisfy my objective. Thanks once again.
Well yes, i’m quite sure that i -am- bonkers. Thanks for the link; it
looks interesting. Initially i thought it still couldn’t help me as i
misunderstood, thinking it only produced a -static- listing of what my
system currently is. I became rather interested though once i read:
> Service migration
> Migrate your services from one kind of system to another. Migrate
> physical systems to the cloud. -Migrate from one operating system
> version to another-. Do this in a repeatable, documented way, which
> can be adapted to your needs.
…which is the entire point of -Aptik-, & what i seek here now in
openSUSE… a way to automate or at least semi-automate the process of
me being able to mimic my setup on a different pc, without having to
-manually- install every package myself, the second time. I shall need
to study -Machinery- more, to decide if it really might satisfy my
objective. Thanks once again.
–
Cheers Malcolm °¿° SUSE Knowledge Partner (Linux Counter #276890)
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None of the alternatives suggested so far seem to provide a similar functionality to Aptik, although i readily concede i might be wrong & have simply not yet correctly understood.
Let me ask my question in a slightly different way. My Lappy, after many weeks of hard graft, ups & downs, & much learning, now has a really nicely setup Tumbleweed; eg, Plasma personalisations [incl. colours, fonts, VDs, Activities, Desktop Effects, wallpapers, widgets etc], non-standard pgms installed, repos… As of today i am now a big step closer to reaching a decision about potentially also migrating my Tower to TW. If i was to do that change, what is the efficient way of mimicking all my Lappy’s configuration in Tower manually implementing every setting to be the same, one by one, is not efficient, even though obviously i’d get there in the end].
In *buntu-land, Aptik is that efficient means. How would any of you do this in TW?
Some warning: I’ve seen what aptik can do: a perfectly running Ubuntu server borked by an aptik action from a laptop.
Once you have some starting point Saltstack is a fine tool for this. The thread below is in dutch, but has a lot of salt examples.
Where I would normally do
zypper in PACKAGE
I now do
salt '*' pkg.install PACKAGE
, where the ‘*’ means 'on all minions ( all machines connected to the salt-master ). It would take a bit of learning ( but hey, you’re doing so anyway ), but it’s pretty soon worth the effort.
On Wed 12 Jul 2017 10:36:01 AM CDT, GooeyGirl wrote:
None of the alternatives suggested so far seem to provide a similar
functionality to -Aptik-, although i readily concede i might be wrong &
have simply not yet correctly understood.
Let me ask my question in a slightly different way. My Lappy, after many
weeks of hard graft, ups & downs, & much learning, now has a really
nicely setup Tumbleweed; eg, Plasma personalisations [incl. colours,
fonts, VDs, Activities, Desktop Effects, wallpapers, widgets etc],
non-standard pgms installed, repos… As of today i am now a big step
closer to reaching a decision about potentially also migrating my Tower
to TW. If i was to do that change, what is the -efficient- way of
mimicking all my Lappy’s configuration in Tower -manually- implementing
every setting to be the same, one by one, is not efficient, even though
obviously i’d get there in the end].
In *buntu-land, -Aptik- is that efficient means. How would any of you do
this in TW?
Hi
There is efficient and there is time consuming… backup and restoring
an OS to an external device is time consuming (inefficient)… haven’t
done it since it takes around 20 minutes to re-install the OS, you can
add your repo’s at install time if required.
As for your desktop setup, have no idea what files are needed for
KDE, but what I have is a /data partition with my main configurations
and have a script that creates/set’s things up via softlinks. Perhaps
look at rsync to copy over your $HOME or fwbackups.
–
Cheers Malcolm °¿° SUSE Knowledge Partner (Linux Counter #276890)
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If you want to script your install or create a custom installer, then AutoYaST, Kiwi and SUSE Studio were mentioned above.
Those would be options primarily for a scenario where you might want to deploy a number of similar machines.
If you’re looking for a personal solution,
Then I’d recommend simply backups using cloning.
Ordinary backups copy files one at a time so are slow and inefficient with lots of overhead.
Cloning doesn’t create the backup based on files but blindly copies the bytes from your source to your target.
Better cloning software can also ignore unused disk space and compress.
Clonezilla is a good choice for personal backups, it provides a number of different options specifying what you want backed up and where to write your backup to.
If you like the idea of cloning and need to backup a number of machines, g4u is an enterprise version of what Clonezilla does.
Oh yes indeed. I’ve not just seen it, i’ve done it, to myself, on a freshly reinstalled Maui. Let’s just say that i was Pretty Unimpressed with myself for quite a while afterwards [pretty much all the time it took to re-reinstall the OS then re-set it up to my tastes again]. However, out of that fiery crucible came a better understanding of how to correctly use it, & when used that way, Aptik is fabulous. I really do wish there was some equivalent in oS.
Thanks. I could not see a relevant link “thread below is in dutch”], but i DDG’d it & read some stuff. At first blush it seems vastly beyond my comprehension… even the mere Wikipedia page was incomprehensible to me re jargon & concepts unfamiliar to me atm… & then the more “hard-core” pages just completely reinforced my inadequacy. I suspect that, if i do find myself able to go ahead with my Tower conversion from Maui to TW [still one obstacle remaining], i should probably just go ahead with manually* replicating my successful Lappy TW setup on Tower, if the semi-automation options [in the absence of an [i]Aptik-like pgm] would require such a steep learning curve for me [ie, take a lot of time].
*That said, last night by experimentation i discovered that copying these files from Lappy to Tower [done on the latter in a VM], for each of my User accounts, does nicely replicate my Lappy TW Desktops & Activities setups in Tower… so this will be handy once [/if] i’m in a position to do it “for real” on Tower:
True, + since being shown in these fora how to create/manage my own personal/local Repo, i now feel that will be a significant benefit during the OS migration too … so long as i ensure that it contains ALL (or at least most of) my non-standard pgms as RPMs, on Lappy, then copy over that directory to Tower post-TW-installation, it will allow me a relatively painless pseudo one-click [NB, not [i]One Click in the oS Package sense] capability.
Per a separate reply post i’ve now discovered several important config files that do the trick for me.
Late last year / early this year i ran for a time with Lappy & Tower dual-booted between two different Linux distros, so i did just this – they each had their own default /home partitions for their own specific non-user-data config stuff, with all my data in a shared separate /data partition, & symlinks where needed. To a point this worked well, & in principle i’d like to continue that separated arrangement indefinitely… but in fact i no longer do. I run & intend continuing to run] most of my pgms sandboxed with Firejail. Whereas this works fine for the default structure of all user-data residing in /home, it rapidly became a horror for me to manage with the distributed structure described, as lots of its important functions [eg, [i]whitelisting, blacklisting, & others] are predicated on the “/home holds everything” paradigm. The Dev told me he has no alternatives to meet my distributed preference… so i regrettably dumped my distributed arrangement.
I still have each of those opened in stacked tabs in my Vivaldi, & will re-read them, but my initial read gave me the feeling that the learning curve needed would not justify its time spent, given i’m talking just one pc to another & of different h/w types].
Thank you. Yes, cloning would be a very handy thing for me to begin using. The [main] reason i haven’t, so far, is slightly tangential & certainly a bit embarrassing… i don’t have a big enough external HDD/SSD for it. Many many times i’ve chided myself for not just getting on with it & buying one… but i always seems to find a reason to not spend the money…
:shame:
To answer my own original question, it seems that the YaST2 Software Manager’s package XML Export/Import function can be very handy, & thus potentially become the putative Aptik facsimile i’ve sought in oS.
I tested this in a TW VM in which i’d originally [deliberately] installed TW with multiple DEs. Post-installation i had also manually installed a variety of other pgms from the standard Repos. I then created the Export XML & stored it external to the VM, then via GParted Live-ISO deleted VM’s root partition, then via Ruby Installer created the new root BtrFS partition, whilst reusing the original Swap & Home partitions. With Ruby this time i selected only the KDE DE. All that worked fine, of course.
Then i went to test this Import concept, to evaluate if this would reinstall all the other Repo pgm packages i’d previously had in the VM. Well, good news / bad news. The Import worked, or would have had I chosen to proceed with actual installation. Trouble is that it imports literally everything I had installed originally, including all the other DEs’ stuff that I do not want. When I tried deselecting some things, it opened the dependency-conflicts can of worms, so I desisted.
From this experiment I can see now that the YaST XML Import/Export function would be a good functional equivalent of *buntu/Mint/Maui’s Aptik pgm, but ONLY if I was recreating the same DE-set as when the XML was first Exported. For situations of radical DE-set difference, I can see no option but to have to tediously manually install each desired package, one by one, after the TW reinstallation. That’s not a complaint, only a statement of apparent unavoidable fact. It illustrates the importance of making wise DE choices during original installation.
Last night i reinstalled TW in my Tower, this time choosing only the KDE Plasma DE, not also all the other DEs of my exuberant but ill-informed initial installation. My Lappy conversely has only ever had KDE Plasma DE during its oS TW life. I tend to keep the same pgms & settings on both PCs, though sometimes my Lappy [being only my secondary pc] lags a little behind my Tower re full pgm complement. Hence, in preparation for Tower’s reinstallation last night, i made sure that i installed the few missing pgms on Lappy that were present {& which i still wanted] on Tower. Then in Lappy’s YaST i Exported the XML. Post-reinstallation of TW on Tower, i then Imported Lappy’s XML file [given that both PCs now had identical DE status] in Tower’s YaST. This worked really well … a great labour/time-saver.
So, summary for any future ex-*buntu-distro users who also change to oS as i have: This simple technique is indeed a worthy replacement for *buntu-distros’ Aptik [the [i]second time around, that is; for the initial installation you’ll still have to do it all manually].
), but it’s pretty soon worth the effort.