Quickest Route to Core OS?

I use a hybrid approach for my base os. I use instadmg for a hardware agnostic OS with base updates (10.7.5 combo, Remote Desktop, iTunes, Safari, Java etc..) and iLife 2011 packaged from Composer in the Custom Packages folder.

Everything else I use in my Casper Admin configurations.

This works most of the time until newer hardware comes out like the ivy bridge macs and retina displays. In that case, I use composer to clone a base OS and use them for hardware-specific configs in Casper admin until the appropriate combo update comes out.

That's interesting Daniel. Have you found issues with using the InstaDMG-build compressed DMG? We hit some issues in deploying my existing InstaDMG-build base images during our JumpStart and the consultant indicated not creating the core image build in Composer was the cause. I'd love to know if you are having success just dropping your defacto InstaDMG'd OS into Casper Admin and using without modification. That would greatly streamline the process.

In the meantime, I have been using FileWave Lightning to generate a base image off the Install Mac OS X download, imaging to an external HD, then sucking that back into Casper Admin, which is (obviously) pretty tedious.

If you go back through older discussions, or even some more recent ones, you'll find many of us use InstaDMG to create our base images. I've never run into problems just dropping an ID created image into Casper and building a config off of it.

I've been doing it that way since I started using Casper back in version 5.

Good to know Steve. In that case, Lightning's finished DMG should be equally as sufficient since all I need a quick way to generate core OS and if tool-agnostic Lightning's a bit faster for me nowadays. Thanks for input guys.