golinux wrote:That's hardly gonna fill a wikipedia page.
Yea I prefer people take it from there because the possibilities are endless. Well not really endless but fairly open. You can do a clean install with your favorite apps and redistribute to others(the way I use to make refracta itself) or make a exact system backup including all your changes to date, or even stop it at the squash stage and customize it further or or, you could.....etc...etc...etc...
I like to use it nowadays to keep my ever evolving system backed up and ready for a reinstall if I screw something up, or change computers or swap hard drives. I always have my tweaked system ready to go. So far this install has been xfce, gnome shell, lxde, and is now kde4....still snapshot'n and reinstalling although I have also switched computers three times also...
I'm hoping to collect everything that fsmithred (and others involved) has posted here and there so I can pull it all together into a viable presentation.
good luck with that
Some history would be good.
...one thing leading to another...used to do a lot of installs....starting from a minimal install got old....live images gave me a quick staring point...extracting and chrooting and tweaking the live image and rebuilding the squash and live image got old real quick(again)....
I had heard of the various remaster tools but for this reason or that none of them interested me much. I did try a couple of them a time or two and while they worked on a different distro I dont think I managed to get any of them to work on real debian. Also they seemed to be a bit complicated to use anyway. Not to mention I suck at coding and already knew that the code for any of those were way beyond me and I knew I had no chance of tweaking it.
As i said, it was really just more of creating various debian builds and getting tired of starting over from scratch.
It also went hand in hand with learning how to 'install' the live image to a hard drive...
When was the first snapshot released?
Most of this was around 2007 i believe or at least shared with others around that time. I think the first ideas and discussion was at one of my long dead forums and/or the cloudywizzard forum which I do not think is available anymore either.
Was it based on other code or written from scratch?
I would have to say scratch. I dissected a debian live image to see how it was put together and then worked backwards from there. Once you realize that it is a few files and a squashed filesystem...well...not much magic beyond that except figuring out what to exclude and tweak. Now I am sure the process is not anything original or inventive as plenty of live images existed before then and the rest is just squashing up your filesystem and what to exclude/tweak. As I said, not really magic, just mostly fooling around and having fun rather than sitting down to create some tool.
How is it different from other cloning options etc. Why is it better?
I am not really for telling someone some thing is 'better' for them than something else, they will have to decide that. I can tell them how it is different. But in this case I do not really know how it is different as I haven't really dug in and looked at any other method although I am sure it is all similar junk.