I installed Kubuntu on a spare work computer and I am now configuring it for the standard user's needs. My goal is to install it on 4 rarely used PCs for them to play around with, and maybe put it on their own computer some time.
There is some stuff I want to be the same on every computer (e.g. Thunderbird instead of Evolution, the mail-in and mail-out server of the users), and stuff that needs to be customized on every machine, like hostname, a different user on each PC...
Also, the computers have differently sized hard drives. Will a 10GB image pushed onto a 300GB hard drive "break" the file system so it seems to be only 10GB big? Sorry, this is hard to explain in English.
Does anyone know of a way to generate a custom image of a full hard disk sda1 as /, sda2 as swap and sda3 as /home? Also, if I just burn the .iso on a DVD I won't be able to boot and push the image on the HDD, right?
Archive the installation with something like FSArchiver and save that on an USB disk or network share or something, and then write the filesystem back to the disks on the 4 machines. A good tool for this is the SystemRescueCD.
After that change whatever you want to change on the systems. (There ways to automate this sort of thing, but it's probably more work to set them up than to change things manually on 4 PCs—that would be different if you had 100 or 1000 PCs of course.)
FSArchiver doesn't care about the size of the source/target filesystem, as long as all the data on the source filesystem fits on the target filesystem.
There is Remastersys: here It allows you to make a DVD from your installed system. The link I provided will give you all the instructions you need in detail.
You could also save a package list (really easy if you have apt://synaptic installed). (You can do it from the first menu).