di ./. FAI

[Thomas Lange]

>>>>> On Sun, 28 Sep 2003 20:03:44 +0000, debacle at debian.org said:

    >  How do di and FAI relate,
FAI does everything which is done in di but without any
interaction. FAI was designed to do mass installations of the OS and
all applications. di is only designed for the installation of one
computer you are sitting in front of. FAI can also partition you local
hard disk using a smart configuration file. di uses cfdisk (for i386)
to partition your harddisk. This is a lot of manuall work and not very flexible.


    >  Will di replace FAI?
No. FAI is mostly used for network installation. CD-ROM installations
using FAI is an ongoing project. FAI has the advantage over di, that
it must not fit on a floppy. Since it mounts its root file system via
NFS, it can have a lot of software available during the installation,
and does not need to split the installer into many pieces to save disk
space.

    >  Will FAI use di?
FAI does everything non interactive which is done in di, without using
di. It does not need anything from di, although it uses mostly the same
unbderlining tools and commands to install the OS and software.

After di ist finished you have a base system installed and configured
on your local disk. Then it's up to you to install and configure
additional software and applications. Even tasksel is not called
during di.

FAI installs the base system using debootstrap, which is also used by
di. Then FAI uses its class concept to install software using tasksel
and apt-get install. Finally some scripts are called to adjust the
system (OS and applications) to your local needs. di can't do this.

    >  Is di only for interactive installation?  
AFAIK yes. But there are plans to support non interactive
installations. But di has no class concept to support mass
installations. Non interactive installations using di will be more a
system like starting di and insert a floppy which include some predefined
answers to all questions of di.

-- 
kind regards Thomas Lange (author of FAI)