AUTOMATIC FOR THE PEOPLE
The first stage of the campaign saw the introduction of the ‘manual’ USB key using Clonezilla. However, the collective soon saw there was room for improvement: “Clonezilla is a cool tool. It has lots of settings though, and you have to navigate through about 20 different screens before the cloning operation starts.” This can be complicated for beginners and also prone to errors, “especially when you’re on your 10th refurbishment of the morning,” add the collective. “Getting through this initial part takes about two minutes, then the actual cloning process only takes between two and 10 minutes, depending on the machine”.
The next stage was the ‘semiautomatic’ key that used MultiSystem (http://liveusb.info/dotclear). Clonezilla has a scripting mode, but this wasn’t quite enough for the refurbishment teams, who have to contend with volatile device labels and different storage configurations. So using MultiSystem,a USB stick is partitioned with a number of clone images and can cater to both BIOS and UEFI systems. It can even configure swap, which isn’t possible with Clonezilla alone.
The final evolution is the fully automatic key, which instead uses the cross-platform Ventoy (featured in our last issue). All that’s required is to set up the partitions, then copy across some scripts and clones. As you’d expect there’s no shortage of tutorials on how to make one (see https://emmabuntus. org/how-to-make-an-emmabuntusrefurbishing-key-with-ventoy). And once you have that you can massrecondition machines about as fast as physically possible. And of course you can then clone the USB itself. Many USBs make light work.