\begin{John Ferlito}
> Has anyone played with automating debian installs? So far I've
> come across fai and replicator which both seem fairly young packages so
> don't really work seamlessly. What I'm really after is something similar
> to redhats kickstart disk. Basically put a disk in the drive debian gets
> installed with a package list i specify and doesn't ask any questions
> and then I just have to config it up.
i got by with hacking the boot-floppies package to use a few different
defaults. it wasn't too hard, but i was aiming for a "just keep
pressing return" install, not a fully automated one.
including a different package list is fairly straightforward, actually
removing the dinstall prompting will need a little more hacking.
preventing package postinsts from prompting should be a little easier
now that most of them use debconf. you just have to seed the debconf
database with your (non-default) answers and/or use the
"noninteractive" frontend. see the debconf docs and the (perl)
source.
there will still be a few packages that prompt - you'll have to just
cope with that, or hack their scripts to avoid the prompt and
repackage them (actually not that hard, just irritating)
boot-floppies for woody will include a non-interactive install
(hopefully) - you may want to join debian-boot and see what they come
up with
alternatively, go the fai approach (iirc), and avoid the boot floppies
altogether. its not hard to hack up a script that does the same job as
the install process and then run it off an nfsroot or something. (i
basically did that by hand for my diskless multia install (using
slink) - see http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~gusl/multia-howto/)
--
- Gus
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