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A typical Debian/Ubuntu installation takes at least 15 minutes, and you have to answer a lot of questions along the way. Yet a VPS service on the Web is able to deploy a ready-to-use Linux server in under 1 minute.

I'd like to have my own prepared image file with pre-installed packages that I can plug straight into VirtualBox, or upload to a hosting service, and -bang- there it is, without the 15 minute manual installation or answering any questions. It's just ready in as little time as possible (like a minute or so).

How can I achieve this?

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  • 1) Install Linux exactly the way you want it. 2) Take a snapshot of the installation.
    – David Schwartz
    Mar 4, 2013 at 10:06
  • Which are good tools for taking snapshots?
    – forthrin
    Mar 4, 2013 at 10:16
  • Each virtual machine system has its own method. Sometimes, you can just copy the machine files.
    – David Schwartz
    Mar 4, 2013 at 10:51
  • VirtualBox supports states of a given virtual machine. You can also simply save the virtual hdd and duplicate and changing the uid as required.
    – Ramhound
    Mar 4, 2013 at 13:02
  • Can I upload this virtual machine image to a hosting service, and it will instantly launch? Or do they only take installation .iso files?
    – forthrin
    Mar 5, 2013 at 20:25

1 Answer 1

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Red Hat provides a tool for automating installs in the form of Kickstart. It allows system administrators to roll out multiple standard installs. While developed originally by Red Hat (and therefore also available on it's clones like Centos and Scientific Linux and is also available on Fedora) it is also used to a lesser extent by some other distributions.

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