An open source ghost story

Could some closed source companies be using OSS without proper credit being given? It certainly seems that way on the surface…

This story began as a review of g4l, a Norton Ghost-type utility for Linux. But that’s not how it ended up. Instead it’s a story of two open source ghosts: g4u and g4l. As ghost stories go, this one is more sad than scary: the tale of a bastard son refusing to recognize his lineage, and of the resulting bad feelings on both sides of the dispute. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start at the beginning.

Hubert Feyrer wrote g4u about six years ago. It’s a NetBSD-based boot diskette similar in functionality to the popular Norton Ghost. G4u’s name is shorthand for “Ghost for Unix.”

Although Feyrer no longer has time to maintain the project — he is now working on his Ph.D. dissertation — it is still available for download on his Web site. I downloaded the CD ISO version and gave it try. It works just fine. I cloned a local partition on the same drive, after spending just a little time matching up the partitions as I knew them in Linux (hda1, hda2, hda3) with the names they are known by in BSD.

You can also clone entire drives, or backup to and restore from an FTP server. All in all, g4u is a very useful tool. Better yet, while it boots NetBSD, it can be used on drives and partitions containing all sorts of operating systems, from Windows, to OS/2, to Linux, to what-have-you.

The user interface is legacy command-line — no pretty GUI, not even DOS- style colored menus. It’s lean and mean, and it works. Feyrer licensed his gift to the world of free software using the BSD license, which requires nothing more than attribution of his work. [Read the rest]