Future of FAI (fwd)

[Niall Young]

On Fri, 22 Nov 2002, Niall Young wrote:

> Ok: my aim is a bootable CD.

Success, with 0 changes to FAI :-)  I haven't documented everything yet,
and there's a lot of gotchas and many improvements required to the
upstream tools I chose, but it works really well.  Scripts at:

    http://www.iinet.net.au/~niall/fai/

Basically it uses mkinitrd-cd to create an initrd that detects all of
your ide/scsi cdrom devices then mounts the one with the FAI BootCD and
kicks off an FAI installation using an optional package pool in
/fai/packages/ or your usual network apt source.  It's very simple, it
just took a while to find the right combination of tools.

I need wider testing and feedback though, so if you're interested please
give it a go and I'll help out by email if you get stuck.  There are
definite bugs with mkinitrd-cd, a few lines need to be un/commented, it
only supports 2.4 kernels despite lines suggesting otherwise, and
you'll want grub 0.93 and the latest mkbimage (syslinux optional but I
recommend grub for fallback - see README).  I haven't had time to do a clean
install and document all of the quirks, but I plan to help out with mkinitrd-cd
and eventually turn this into a more generic tool for building any kind of
bootable Debian CD.  Then add Knoppix style hardware detection etc. and
build upon this as a common bootable "architecture" for many different
projects to use.  MoviX and miscellaneous firewall appliances are great
examples, game emulators or even a Linux gaming console would be interesting.
Again, it's all very easy and many people are doing it now, there's just a
serious lack of mature tools and documentation.

Niall Young                                    Chime Communications Pty Ltd
niall at chime.net.au                            Level 6, 263 Adelaide Terrace
Ph: (+61) 08 9213 1330 / 0408 192 797         Perth, Western Australia 6000

     "there's a lot of movement in my trousers at the moment"
                                     -- Dennis Kristofich, Sep 2002