I'm very happy to announce, that FAI now can install and configure CentOS and Scientific Linux Cern (SLC). You can use a Debian FAI server for installing CentOS version 5 and 6 or SLC 5 and 6.
As an example I've also built a FAI multi-distribution CD which installs those three different Linux distributions with different configurations. Get this ISO image from http://fai-project.org/fai-cd/ This installation is very quick. I've done a CentOS 6.0 installation (with graphical desktop) in 199 seconds (in a kvm instance on a quad-core 3.2GHz, hard disk in RAM) and it only needs 490 seconds on the real hardware when installing from CD. Below is a short description how to install CentOS or SLC via network from your FAI server. Feedback is always welcome. Please send your feedback to the linux-fai mailing list https://lists.uni-koeln.de/mailman/listinfo/linux-fai/ Best regards, Thomas, in behalf of the FAI team ------------------------------ How to install CentOS or Scientific Linux Cern using FAI 3.4.8 - install FAI 3.4.8 on your Debian install server (squeeze) - create the nfsroot as usual - get the config space examples from FAI 4.x http://fai-project.org/download/misc/fai4-config.tar.gz (or svn co svn://svn.debian.org/svn/fai/trunk/examples/simple config) - get the basefile for CentOS/SLC version 5 or 6 for your architecture at http://fai-project.org/download/basefiles/ and put it into <your-config-space>/basefiles - echo USE_SETUP_STORAGE=1 >> your-config-space/class/CENTOS.var - add your install client to the class CENTOS and one of these classes: CENTOS6_32 CENTOS6_64 SLC6_32 SLC6_64 Edit class/50-host-classes. A host named slchost or centos will get these classes automatically. - If you would like to install a graphical desktop onto your install clients, add the class XORG. This works similar for CentOS 5 and SLC 5 (uncomment relevant line in package_config/CENTOS). Enjoy the non-Debian installation.