debian automatic installation methods

[Thomas Lange]

>>>>> On Wed, 04 Aug 2004 16:26:49 -0500, Jin Zhao <jzhao at qcorps.com> said:


    > from Redhat to Debian and find myself facing multiple ways for automatic 
    > installation -- fai, replicator, systemimager,
    > autoinstall. Before .....
    > Can anybody introduce your own experiences with these methods
    > and also your preferences for them?

    > Any ideas are welcome. Hopefully people won't give me suggestion on fai only. :)

If you want to compare different installation tools have a look at
following things (fai answers in braces):

- How long does this project/software exist? (fai nearly 5 years)
- How much development is done in the past few month? (a lot)
- is the project still active ? (surely!)
- how much entries are in the changelog files or are these only bug
  fixes?
- look at user reports
  (eg. http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/q-answers) 
- which architectures are supported? (i386,IA64, PPC, Sparc, AMD64)
- Does the installation tool has a class system or something similar
  to group similar config in one class? (yep)
- PXE support (yep)
- Booting from floppy/CD-ROM? (yes / fai-bootCD can do CD-ROM)
- hardware detection with discover (yes, using discover2)
- Can you install your first example in one hour? (hope so with the
  next simple examples)
- Is there a mailling list or support from the authors? (yep)

    > servers. From what I learned so far, auto-install and fai seem more 
    > flexible than others. I am currently testing auto-install and will try 
    > fai later.
It would be nice, if you post your experiences with the two tools and
your decision which you will choose. Also send me suggestions on how
to improve fai ;-)
-- 
regards Thomas