Installing mixed potato / woody

[Alexander List]

On Wed, 3 Apr 2002, Thomas Lange wrote:

>Currently, different sources.list files are not supported. But I would
>do it this way. Create two different nfsroot filesystems, one using
>potato and basetgz, the other for woody created with
>debootstrap. These two nfsroots can have different sources.list. Then
>your bootp or dhcp daemon can select the nfroot depending on the
>hostname or ip-address.

I suggest that this be implemented, for the following reason. APT seems to
be a quite reasonable tool for package management. And there is a version
of APT that supports RPM packages. So I think this might be the way to go
if we want to have RPM-based installations on the client.

> >    > BTW, some of our users wanted to test their software on a fixed
>    > Red Hat setup. I found it very easy to adapt FAI to the
>Several people are interested in FAI for redhat. But maybe the better
>way is to switch from redhat to Debian ;-)

There is several circumstances where you don't want to use Debian on the
client. Debian is a good distribution, and I use it whenever possible.
However, if you want to test some software configuration on different
platforms, sometimes you just need one of the other distros.

This is especially true if there's some binary package that is only
supported on e.g. RedHat or SuSE (etc...), and it's linked against a
library that is not availble on Debian.

Anyway, the tech support guys immediately stop talking to you if you have a
configuration that's not officially supported...

> >    > needs. Could do the same for other operating systems too of
>    > course.

Sounds fascinating. How about BSDs first, and then Win*?

>Currently, L'm porting FAI to SUN Solaris in conjunction with Solaris
>Jumpstart.

I am _very_ interested in this. We have a test network with Solaris and
sparc and i386-based clients (more platforms could _eventually_ be added
later) and I can offer you a hand in testing certain stuff.

However, I'm not a coder...

Alex