Hi. My first post here, glad to find this community.
So, I am thinking if it is possible to create a USB drive which captures the image of an installed OS. In other words, I have a Kubuntu which has some apps in it with certain settings and I would like this to be burned in a USB drive ‘as it is’; so that when I install it–using the same USB drive–in a different PC/laptop, all my programs and (if possible) files appear with their respective settings/config on that new machine. I know this can be done in Windows (Ghosting) and shouldn’t be too hard for Linux/Kubuntu either, I guess.
Is it possible to do so? If yes, please suggest a noob friendly method.
However, this won’t always work without issues, because different machines have different stuff and when you save, for example, network settings then they probably won’t be correct for a different machine.
The safest way I would suggest for you is to create a good ol’ backup.
See Q5:
If you create a plain old backup, you can select what’s backed up, etc. Usually, it’s enough to save to your home folder. Sometimes you can even add /etc and similar. However, as previously mentioned, it’s important to not restore too much, when settings simply won’t match in a different environment.
If you, however, want to create a persistent Live USB Stick, i.e. a stateful OS put onto a portable storage medium, then you can do something as written in the following article.
Yes, it must be called cloning – if I knew that term, wouldn’t have created this post (would have right away searched for it, just like I did after reading your reply, plenty of posts on cloning).
Thanks again. My machines are generally of low config and I am more bothered about correct apps and files, not so much about network settings. This is meant for home use only, and not …say, preparing an entire office of 100-200 machines, so I should be good with this.
That’s not what I meant. I meant, that, for example, the original machine uses a Wi-Fi connection, while the next uses ethernet, only. So, if you would copy that configuration to the other machine, it could lead to internet-lessness on the new machine, except you specifically change the configuration, after backup restoration.