I just came upon two articles by Thomas Driemeyer. The author seems to be very sincere in his attempt to describe his experiences in switching from Linux to Apple (and subsequently back) and his good sense of humor makes the
Clone Disk Drives with Ubuntu. Make an Exact Copy of Your Hard Drive.
Before I start, I would like to clarify that this step by step tutorial applies not only to duplicating hard drives that have Linux OS on them. You can clone pretty much any drive. What is on the hard disk
Manage What Applications to Run on Boot in Ubuntu
Update: November 20th, 2009 I am not sure what I was thinking when I wrote this post, but if you want to easily control the programs that run on boot from a graphical interface go to: System -> Administration ->