ghosting software

For those of us that rebuild our computer operating systems every few months, we’re in luck. FOG, a free, Open Source ghosting solution has been released. You can create ghost images of a clean OS, to rebuild from at a later date. This makes things a tad easier, and cheaper than re-installing from scratch. As you can see from the official description below, it supports Windows XP and Vista.

Fog is a Linux-based, free and open source computer imaging solution for Windows XP and Vista that ties together a few open-source tools with a php-based web interface. Fog doesn’t use any boot disks, or CDs; everything is done via TFTP and PXE. Also with fog many drivers are built into the kernel, so you don’t really need to worry about drivers (unless there isn’t a linux kernel module for it). Fog also supports putting an image that came from a computer with a 80GB partition onto a machine with a 40GB hard drive as long as the data is less than 40GB.

Fog also includes a graphical Windows service that is used to change the hostname of the PC, restart the computer if a task is created for it, and auto import hosts into the FOG database. The service also installs printers, and does simple snap-ins.