14 DAY TRIAL // The Pinguy OS developers have just announced the release of a brand new tool that many of you out there will love, an alternative, or a fork if you want to call it that, to the very popular Remastersys utility for backing up or remixing Ubuntu distros.
Back in the days, Remastersys was extremely popular, used by numerous users to clone and back up their Ubuntu installations, but mostly to generate custom ISO images of various Ubuntu releases or derivatives of the world's most popular GNU/Linux operating system.
Unfortunately, Remastersys is no longer maintained, and if you manage to find a copy of it somewhere on the Internet, it will not work with recent versions of Ubuntu Linux. So, today we're happy to report on a new tool, called Pinguy Builder, which is a fork of Remastersys and brings support for the latest Ubuntu releases.
Pinguy Builder is used by the developers of the Pinguy OS GNU/Linux distribution to remix the latest versions of Ubuntu into what they call Pinguy OS and Pinguy OS Mini projects. The tool is, of course, much more advanced than Remastersys and has a bunch of new features, as you can see below.
"Decided to share my fork of remastersys. This is the script used to build Pinguy OS. The script can create a livecd of the installed system and works with *buntu systems. You can either make a distributable livecd or a backup of your system," said one of the Pinguy OS developers in the announcement.
Highlights of Pinguy Builder
Prominent features of Pinguy Builder include support for the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) and Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) operating systems, full UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) support, including support for an EFI partition on the generated ISO image, as well as support for the XZ compression method for smaller ISO images.
Additionally, the new Pinguy Builder tool is capable of populating the pool folder with grub-efi, so you can install the OS without the need for an Internet connection, and to update the GRUB entry with the name that is used for labeling the CD image. Pinguy Builder is available for download from the Pinguy OS website, distributed as DEB packages for Ubuntu and similar OSes.