FAI release 2.4 is now available !

[Thomas Lange]

The new FAI release 2.4 is now available !

It was a very long time without a new release. But now it's time to
upgrade! FAI version 2.4 is tested with Debian 3.0 aka woody. There
are many, many improvements included especially

- lots of changes in the templates scripts
- kernel 2.4.20 support
- use a stand alone script for defining classes

The new package is available at the FAI homepage

        http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/

and also on the Debian mirrors. Many thanks to all who were involved
into the process of improving FAI. Please send any comment, bug
report and enhancements to fai at informatik.uni-koeln.de. You will
notice that the news are getting longer from one version to the next ;-)

New in FAI 2.4

    - Era Erikson did some great work on proofreading all manuals and
      script comments. Great work Era!
    - lots of updates in the fai guide
    - use the script fai-class for defining classes; scripts in class/
      must not have prefix S; the following command renames your
      existing scripts so they will work with the new command:
      rename 's/S(\d\d.+)(\.sh|\.pl)/$1/' S*
      the order of scripts executed has slightly changed; all classes
      from the file $HOSTNAME are defined after the scripts in class/
      are executed; the suffix .sh or .pl is not needed any more,
      fai-class has a manual page
    - kernel 2.4.20 is the default kernel during installation
    - USB keyboard support during installation
    - make-fai-bootfloppy creates a more generic boot floppy which
      uses grub or lilo as boot loader, it supports more than one boot
      protocol, more disk space is available on the floppy
    - the exit status of every hook and script is written to
      status.log
    - the hook faiend.LAST parses all log files for warnings and
      errors and writes them to error.log
    - variable.sh lists all variables defined after task defvar has finished
    - FAI_LOCATION is now defined in fai.conf, FAI_ACTION is defined
      in LAST.var, do not use T170 and T171 via a BOOTP or DHCP server
      ( but it;s still possible)
    - hooks can make their tasks to be skipped (as in fai 2.2)
    - templates scripts and config files has been rewritten and added
      ( eg. WWWKIOSK, a notebook with Windows and Linux)
    - a new default location for the Debian mirror (in mkdebmirror and
      fai.conf)
    - much of reorganizing the code, but this does not change the user
      visible behavior
    - some functions that were defined as shell subroutines are now
      separate scripts in /usr/lib/fai (fai-class, create_ramdisk,
      prepare_apt, fai-divert, fai-savelog, task_sysinfo, ...), they
      are not standalone script, most of them only work in the fai
      environment, this should solve the problems with a too big
      environment (when using xargs)
    - PATH always starts with /usr/local/{sbin,bin}
    - new FAI_FLAG syslogd starts log daemons (syslogd and klogd) only
      on demand
    - save log files to host $LOGSERVER if defined, otherwise use
      $SERVER
    - make-fai-nfsroot always does setup for dhcp and bootp, and uses
      following sources to create the file sources.list for the
      nfsroot: the variable $FAI_SOURCES_LIST or the files
      /etc/fai/sources.list or /etc/apt/sources.list
    - you can add a list of classes after the PACKAGE command in files
      in package_config, so the following packages will only be
      installed for this class (Please only use this in the file
      package_config/DEFAULT)
    - fcopy has new option -i and -B
    - the variable addpackages can contain a list of packages without
      their version number, therefore /fai/files/packages should be a
      simple repository
    - a lot of bug fixes

-- 
regards Thomas