What a pack of whingers posting the comments above. G4L does what it is supposed to do, well done.

Quite useless - wouldn't boot on my hardware (which is 10 year old configuration but does install and run Ubuntu 9.10 happliy enough). Kernel panic - not syncing (first trace line was panic+0x42/0xe5)

First, I've been the maintainer since version 0.14, so am bias on the program.
I have to agree the documentation is not up to the level it should be, but have had some students work on updating the docs, but during that time two additional versions came out, so updates to the updates need to be done. Hopefully, that will come out shortly.

The program is an iso image, so it needs to be burned to a CD as an ISO and booted from the CD.

The CD is not a full Linux Distro, but designed to have a basic GUI that can make backups to networks using ftp, ssh or cifs (windows) options. The program using ncftp for ftp and that is links to the network menu. The local, ssh and cifs backups are done via the local menu, since the ssh and cifs mount the remote shares to the local /mnt/local directory.

The cd includes a number of kernels to hopefully support most hardware, and the file systems is about 9MB in size.

The program can also be run directly from boot loaders link grub, and even from windows using grub4dos. Even a g4l-win.exe that installs that, but not yet released.

I would appreciated any suggestions or comments. The ntfsclone addition came from an users request, and has proved a great addition.

Please feel free to email me.
mikes@kuentos.guam.net
or check the sourceforge website.
Thank You.

to the users who can't install - it's aln iso file. burn it on a cd and run it. for more help go to the project help forum - http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=408763

downloads an ISO file. No instructions for installling it or making it work. Useless.

Im new to linux. If you want to beat windows, then simple it up and dumb it down. Im rooting for you.

How do i install this iso??

I've seen lot's of things that are, from a users perspective, just plain wrong with the current version (July 2008)

But to start with the most important problems: it doesn't work, documentation is low quality, 'essential' unix tools like ssh/ftp/nc(netcat) are missing on the g4l boot-cd.
Mounting tools like nfsmount/ftpmount/sshmount are missing too. making this cd worse than any other random linux/bsd distro installation cd..

NTFS partitions are supported, but as g4l itself fails, it's not possible to use it for making backups (I haven't tried local backups myself though, just tried network backup)


So for now, to backup I'll be using the following command:

dd if=/dev/hda1 | ssh user@sshserver "gzip -9 >backup-hda1.dd.gz"

and for restoring:

ssh user@sshserver "cat backup-hda1.dd.gz | gunzip" | dd of=/dev/hda1

All using another FreeBSD or Linux cd.. as G4L fails even on these basic commands.

Wasted a brand new cd-recordable on this..