Why you should use Partimage

Partimage has saved my computer so many times, and it can save yours too! Here's why you need it:

1. You can back up all of your partitions, assuming you have HD space somewhere. When I say back up, I mean that there's an image created that holds your entire system.

2. You can restore your whole system to exactly the way it was when you backed it up. Some people pay loads of money for programs like Norton Ghost to do this. Which brings us to the next point.

3. It's free. No extortion. 'Nuff said.

4. If you have similar systems you can work on perfecting a Linux system on one of the computers, then image it and restore it to each of your other comps. This saves a lot of time and effort. And it's great if your wireless doesn't work and you need a networkless install. I had an old Thinkpad with a usable Atheros wireless card, and I used it to set up a system for my Acer Aspire One netbook with bleeding-edge wireless support under madwifi (needed for newer Atheros cards) and a custom kernel that would allow all the hardware to work out of the box. This saved me hours of frustration. A networkless Arch or Gentoo install is a serious pain in the ass.

5. If you use the extended filesystem, resizing partitions is tricky and you can lose all your data. Partimage automatically shrinks filesystems to the size of the partition when it makes an image. Let's say you were careless with your partitioning scheme on your first install. You had an 80gb hard drive, and allocated 5gb to /boot, 40gb to /, and 35 to /home:

/sda1 /boot 5gb
/sda2 / 40gb
/sda3 /home 35gb

Unless you are downloading every single compatible package, 40gb is waaaay too much for a / partition. And /boot rarely even reaches 1gb unless you have 30+ compiled kernels sitting around in there. Therefore you can allocate at least 60gb for /home. The partimage way is to image each partition, shrink each filesystem, delete all your partitions on the drive, resize them as needed, then restore. With parted, you'd have to delete partitions, copy, move and resize for each one, then hope that none of your data got lost! However, it's painless to image and restore, and you automatically have a stable backup as soon as your images are done. With a livecd/liveusb and an external hdd, you can fire up partimage and rebuild your partition scheme easily.

6. You can make snapshots of your data. Let's say you have a 500gb external hard drive, and the partitions above. Before you do major system updates, it's a good idea to back up your / partition. Also, it is wise to periodically save all of your /home personal data. So, fire up your systemrescuecd before major updates and periodical backups, and image to .bz2. The compression ratio is %20 better than a gzipped file. You can just add a date suffix or label to each backup, and you have a complete backup solution.

7. What's that you say, O reader? You don't have an external hard drive or storage device. Well no fear because partimage can split up the files automatically, over whatever storage media you have. Be it DVDs, CD-Rs, usb sticks, or even floppy disks (wow!), partimage can split up the image and systematically restore it from all of those disks. Cool, huh?

Hmm, it occurs to me that I should add some more specific technical details to here. And I will, when I can find the time. Until then, here's the partimage source. Enjoy. If nothing else, I hope this post at least causes you to check out the package, if not avidly start using it.

Linux Quandries? Us Too!

My brother and I decided at about the same time to begin the transition from Windows to Linux. He wanted to switch because he had to take his school laptop in for service and the techs decided to just wipe his Windows and not reinstall it for him (ok, for him for free). I'm a software developer who, by some strange twist of fate, has had the same all-Micro$soft-all-the-way boss for most of my career and I want to branch out to more useful technologies like Java and PHP.

To start out he installed ubuntu while I did kubuntu - he on his 4-year-old IBM ThinkPad laptop and I on my 7-year-old custom-built P4 tower. We did the installs while on the phone since he's 5 hours away at school. It went smoothly for both of us...a little too smoothly. Within a few days he'd decided he wanted to try Gentoo. I was feeling much the same, so we set aside a weekend and a few gigs of hard drive space on our machines...and it was ON! I'm now using Gentoo on an old Compaq Presario 1800t laptop given to me by my father-in-law and am trying to find a weekend to backup my Vista install and put Gentoo on my new custom Quad-core tower. He has Arch on his Acer netbook and just put Gentoo on the ThinkPad.

Alright, with the background out of the way we'll get on with what we're sure you're here for :) All (ok, let's say most to be safe) following posts will be detailed explanations of the problems we've encountered and how they were solved.