Hello,
A somewhat different approach is to copy the entire filesystem into a new computer, and run the old operating system in parallel with the new one.
I'm doing this myself, and this approach works surprisingly well:
https://billauer.co.il/blog/2018/11/linux-chroot-system-in-parallel/
And when I say that it works, I mean that some of the system's services still belong to the old OS. For example, the DHCP server on the machine that I write this mail on belongs to Fedora 12. Why? Because I never had a good reason to replace it with the current system's.
The obvious advantage is that the transition to the new computer can be gradual. At some point, you'll just turn off the old computer because everything runs fine on the new one.
So all you need is tar.
The drawback that I can see with a full image of the old system (except for the obvious waste of disk space) is that the old kernel may not be compatible with the virtual machine. Which can be solved by installing a newer kernel. But then, why bother running a full virtual machine? You might as well use chroot. Which brings me back to my original suggestion.
Regards, Eli
On 04/11/2023 9:34, Michael Shiloh wrote:
Hello all,
Situation: We have a linux computer with various software installed on old hardware that may malfunction and be unsupported. To mitigate this risk, we would like to make an image of this machine so that we can run it in a virtual machine.
How do we do this?
Thanks, Michael