[SOLVED] duplicate/clone an xbian installation

[Karen Pollard]

(2nd Jun, 2013 08:07 AM)mk01 Wrote:  btw; if you are putting so much importance into the actual RPi setup / files, transform RPi to a thin-client. move the filesystem to a mirrored NAS (or similar solution) and boot the RPi directly from network. I'm using it like this, you just needs the small VFAT partition to load network and rootfs is mounted from network directly via NFS.

Hi there MK01

How would one go about such a setup. It seems vastly preferable to relying on sdcards for the working filesystem. Could you give an overview of what's involved ?

Also, you may be able to shed some light on this quandary I have from THIS THREAD.

I have compiled XBMC Gotham on an xbian pi with the latest xbmc-pvr-addons (v.1.8.1). It has solved ALL of my problems with mythtv and there were lots of issues (EPG stalling, slow EPG load, FF, RW, HD channels not working (BBC especially)).

Now, I'd like to share an image of this setup with the world for others in the same quandary (with explicit warnings that it effectively means you can't use xbian-updates etc in the future or it will no doubt overwrite the compiled gotham version etc etc....

But the image file is 16GB. I have the image file on a linux box and am struggling to safely shrink it. I need to know how to safely know how much it can be shrunk by ?

Thanks for any help you can give with either of the above questions and BIG THANKS for all you do on xbian on pi !!! It's my favoured distro !

kp