New install from old Mageia

[Max]

Hi
My wife is currently working on a very old laptop set up with Mageia. She's doing research work on it, and that required a lot of software that isn't really in the repos, and couldn't always be found in source. This means that we spent about a month rebuilding parts of programs, reconfiguring configs for static binaries and generally throwing stuff at the computer hoping it would stick (a surprising amount of it did).
Anyway, we want to get a new laptop, but we don't want to spend another month getting everything to work again. (Because I sure as hell don't remember what it is we did to make the whole environment work)
So, how do I take a currently running Mageia install and build myself an installable medium from it. I don't want to clone the drive, because the hardware configuration on the new laptop is sure to be different.
Also, the current laptop is 32 bit architecture, and the new laptop will almost certainly be 64 bit.

And for my next question: any new laptop will come with Windoze 8, which we don't want to remove. It could come in handy because (sadly) many people and work forces require it. So once I have my customized installable Mageia2 I want to install it as a dual-boot. With Win7 (and Vista and XP) that was no problem for me. But I think it may be more difficult this time....

[oj]

The 32 bit/64 bit difference won't allow you to make a 'live' environment out of your existing system and install it on a new one. You'll end up with a 32 bit OS on the 64 bit machine.

Not that this is a bad thing, you may well want to install the 32 bit system, seeing as you have done all that work to get it running.

i would clone the system. The hardware differences would be relatively easy to straighten out after the fact. Main things would be networking and video. The video may well straighten itself out. For networking, you'll most likely have to make a new connection that will have a different name, eg the original is eth0, the new connection will be eth1. Only a big deal if you have scripts looking for the active interface.

Sorry to hear about the 'necessity' of having windows 8. I'll light a candle for ya.

[Max]

I think I'd like to try making a live install.
How would I go about doing that? And what kind of trouble can I expect from Windoze and UEFI SecureBoot when I try to install?

[doktor5000]

You may want to look at https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Installation ... k_Installs
Windows is best installed beforehand, as then you get a nice dualboot setup automatically.
For UEFI, take a look at Peters thread here: viewtopic.php?p=28498#p28498

[Max]

You may want to look at https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Installation ... k_Installs

That is a useful link, but not what I want.
I don't want to download a minimalistic Mga2 install. I want to create an install image from my running Mageia.
I work at the tech center for a college. For a while we were creating ghost images and then just putting them on new computers. But Pretty soon we got too many different kinds of computers to start having a ghost image of each and every hardware configuration. It got unwieldy. So now what we did was to create a "blank slate" Windows install. We install Windows once on one machine, configure everything properly, install the programs that we need and set up all the settings the way they should be. Then we strip out the hardware-specific drivers and create and installable image from within Windows, and put that on our local server. Then it's just a matter of plugging a new computer into the right subnetwork, booting it off the network, and WDSinstalling the image we had prepared. So, ideally, I'd like to be able to create an installable image from my currently running Mageia, with all the programs installed and configured properly.

Windows is best installed beforehand, as then you get a nice dualboot setup automatically.

Yup. I've been doing it that way for years.

For UEFI, take a look at Peters thread here: viewtopic.php?p=28498#p28498

Thanks. But that only works if the BIOS is set up sanely and allows for one to easily disable secure boot with the click of an F8.

[merlin]

You might wish to run your old Mageia inside a Virtual Machine (VM) under a Windows host or Linux host. This might get around Win8 boot issues but I am not sure.

Windows and Linux hosts can run virtualization software such as VirtualBox (free) and VMWare (commercial).

I believe it should be possible to install the old Mageia into a virtual machine and use that as a surrogate. This gives you the compatibility with VirtualBox virtual hardware. The VM environment will be agnostic to the hardware platform so you should be able to copy the VM virtual disks between platforms. Once your surrogate is running, you can then copy across your old libraries and programs. Note that Linux puts core distro files in separate directories to user compiled and installed directories such as /usr/bin versus /usr/local/bin. You will need to research that, but you should be able to identify from your old Mageia 2 system, what stuff is distro eg. RPM installed, and what was compiled and installed by the user. If you look in the $PATH variable you can see where the system looks for stuff.

Therefore, I suggest you look into virtualization as a solution.