The new FAI 5.5.1 version is now available. Here are some of the changes: fcopy -S which does variable substitution in the form of {%varname%} now also executes a preinst script if available. You can now create ISO images greater 4GB. Syncing software raid devices during installation is now disabled, which speeds up the installation for soft raid setups a lot.
I managed to disable the question for each new user which xfce panel to use (empty or default). This was hard work to find out and there's no tool or easy config option to set in XFCE. It seems that the desktop developers do not think about automation like we sysadmin do all day long. Finally, the script fai-mirror can now handle backports repositories. I will use this feature for creating FAI CD's for Debian stable using a kernel from backports in the future. I plan to extend the FAI.me service https://fai-project.org/FAIme so you can build your own customized installation image with a backports kernel or other packages from backports. The new FAI packages are also available for stretch using this line in sources.list: deb https://fai-project.org/download stretch koeln -- regards Thomas