Well, since I'm a noob!  I thought I'd describe my situation as a way of introduction.

I take care of computers for a school (among other duties) and I recently needed to make 8 laptop computers with identical hardware look/feel/behave exactly the same.  I've used older versions of Ghost, and to be honest, never got too comfy with them.  I purchased drive snapshot, but havn't had it long enough to do a recover yet - so I was looking for an easy to use cloning solution, with which I could easily "duplicate" these laptop configs.

I don't know how I found it, but I got a copy of clonezilla last week, and started trying it out.  I mangled a few setups first, but after a little practice, yesterday I was able to take one of the laptops (configured with the proper software, printer drivers, etc) and create an image on an external USB drive (NTFS).  I then was able to copy that image onto the other seven laptops.  After each was imaged, I used NewSID to avoid network name collisions, and viola! I was done. 

What impressed me was that I could copy the image from ext. HD to laptop without opening the laptop case to get at the HD, and it only took about 15 minutes from opening the laptop lid to final power off. 

Of course, this is with proper site licenses for all the OS and Apps.

I'm wondering, has anyone else tried clonezilla?  I like Ghost, but never really got comfortable with it.  Clonezilla seems to do what I need it to do quickly and easily enough ... perhaps my use is simpler than the way others need to use cloning apps. 

Opinions? 

Thanks.

ps.  While I'm no linux geek, I have installed Ubuntu on an old beater box for my wife to use in her office.  She's not a power user by any means, and she goes back and forth between WinXP and Ubuntu without a problem.  She mostly works on docs/spreadsheets with openoffice and Microsoft Office 2003, and the usual email and web stuff.  I think that says alot about the usability of some distros like Ubuntu.  I've worked on other folks' machines running Vista, but I don't think I'll be buying that for myself any time soon.

Great forums!  Thanks for the all the great info.