FAI MultiDistro

[Thomas Lange]

>>>>> On Thu, 19 Oct 2006 14:09:29 +1000, Edward Murphy <edward.murphy at proxima-tech.com> said:

    > Primarily i would like to install Ubuntu Server, however I am also
    > interested in using fai to install Centos, or better yet RedHat AS/ES
    > Linux.
Ok. First Ubuntu.
Reinhard is preparing FAI 3.X version for ubuntu edgy. We hope that
this version will be included into edgy. You can see the sources here:
http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/fai/people/siretart/

For other distribution (rpm based) this is how it's done. Use FAI 3.1
(will be released in a few days) or newer. You will still use a Debian
(or Ubuntu) nfsroot that is easily create using the make-fai-nfsroot
command. The difficult part is to create the base.tgz file for the
other distributions. Have a look at this url

http://faiwiki.informatik.uni-koeln.de/index.php/FAI_multi-distribution

It's a little bit outdated, because since FAI 3.0 there's a new
subdirectory in the config space called basefiles/ where you should
put your Centos or SLES or RHES base.tgz file. Call this file
SLES10.tar.gz for e.g. and define a class for your install client
called SLES10, the it will extract this base tar file and the the
default Debian one. The tool for installing packages (called
install_packages) also nows how to install pacakges via rpm, urpm, yum
and other methods. Have a look at the code.

And sure you have to adjust the package_config files, since packages
may have different names. And check all scripts in
scripts/... directories which are sometimes Debian specific. 

BTW, I happy about any feedback how this works and maybe you like to
update the wiki pages concerning this topic.
-- 
regards Thomas