[olug] Watching installs to reproduce/replicate later.

[Eric W. Biederman]

Aric Aasgaard <aric at omahax.com> writes:

> InstallRite for Windows was good stuff I used it to make installers
> for old DOS laboratory programs that came on floppy disks.  It was
> also a sneaky way to circumvent copy protection because you could
> snapshot it before and after you registered and see the
> difference. ..........Yeah I'd also like an easy way to do that in
> Linux.
> -------- Original message --------
> From: Dan Linder <dan at linder.org> 
> Date: 02/03/2015  3:31 PM  (GMT-06:00) 
> To: Omaha Linux User Group <olug at olug.org> 
> Subject: [olug] Watching installs to reproduce/replicate later. 
>  
> Many years ago on Windows there was a tool I could use to take a snapshot
> of a computer, then I could install programs, edit files, update the
> registry, reboot, etc, and the next time I ran that snapshot tool it would
> save a file that summarized all the changes performed.  From there it was
> possible to replicate that install to other compatible Windows systems by
> "replaying" that summary file.
>
> Can anyone point me to a similar tool on the Linux side (RHEL/CentOS)?

Though not as polished the classix unix solution is tar and diff, and patch.

I expect with docker and friends there are some much more polished
versions of that basic concept.  Being able to replicate an exact
environment in the cloud is all the rage these days.

Eric