beta version of next fai release available

[Andre Luis Lopes]

Thomas Lange wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> on http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/download/developers there's
> the new beata version of the next fai release available. Please have a
> look at it and reports major problems within one week. Also send me an
> email, if an important patch was not applied to it. In the next days I
> will fixe the fai guide, and then I plan to release it in one or two
> weeks. 

    Nice :-) Some time ago I had an idea about wirting something like a 
"What's new in Sarge" for Woody users (maybe I need t coordinate with 
the debian-doc at lists.debian.org guys which are in charge of the RELEASE 
NOTES) and started collecting interesting packages and features I found 
while using Sarge (in fact, sid, but it wil be Sarge someday).

    I'm also thinking about mentioning FAI and give it more evidence as 
I  started using it some weeks ago and it works very well.

> Here are the most important news:
> 
>     - make FAI ready-to-use for sarge

    Excellent ! I got it working but needed to change some things, which 
I learnt from searching the mailing list archives.

>     - make the examples much easier, remove a lot of unused stuff

    That's the point ! Easier to understand examples are a *must* to 
attract more users. Thank you for working on this.

>     - fai.conf is split into two files, make-fai-nfsroot specific
>       variables are moved to /etc/fai/make-fai-nfsroot.conf

    No personal opinon on this one. I found the old way easy, but 
welcome the new way as well.

>     - make-fai-nfsroot: more packages for hardware detection included,
>       write a warning if $FAI_SOURCES_LIST is used

    Better hardware detection is always good. That's something people 
will start being used to as long as thew new debian-installer (d-i) hits 
the streets.

    It already has a good hardware detection and people wil love seeing 
the same quality available into FAI.

>     - rcS_fai: if a file /.nocolorlogo exists, do not enable colored
>       logo and let scroll region unchanged

    No opinion on this one also.

>     - 06hwdetect.source: new call of discover2, includes now code of
>       11modules.source 

    Hmm, do you know that d-i currently is using discover1 instead of 
discover2 ? Maybe you should ask debian-boot at lists.debian.org about 
which is better.

    They tried using discover2 by default but things didn't went too 
well so discover1 was kept as the default. It seems (not sure) that 
discover2  hardware recognition database is also not as complete as 
discover1's.

>     - task_sysinfo: show serial numbers of hard disks, show usb
>       information

    Good :-)

>     - fai-chboot with PXE can now use localboot, so we need not copy
>       the kernel image and initrd to the install server, new option -d

    Nice. I surely will find a way to make use of it.

>     - grub-install does not probe floppy drive (which can hang the system
>       for a long time)

    Thanks again. I never had a hang with it, but it looked ugly seeing 
all those floppy related errors during FAI execution on client installs.

>     - mkdebmirror: mirrors now woody and sarge in one directory

     Nice, however, I personally used debmirror manually to create my 
woody mirror. For Sarge, as I needed a tool to build partial mirrors, I 
went shopping and found debpartial-mirror (it's in testing and unstable).

    It works fine and is easy to setup. Also, it's made by a friend of 
mine :-)

    Will give this FAI beta a try once I get more time.

-- 
André Luís Lopes
andrelop at utah.com.br