FAI for other distributions

[Henning Sprang]

On 6/25/07, Henning Fehrmann <henning.fehrmann at aei.mpg.de> wrote:
> Hello,
> we are looking for an automatical installation system, which is able to
> install different distributions (Gentoo, Suse, CentOs, ...).
>
> Has somebody experience in this direction using FAI?

FAI contains support for these (apart of the package manager for
gentoo is missing), ut it is neither well tested nor documented.

The  most important things:

1) you need to create the minimal image on your own and put it into
the configspace, in the directory basefiles and call it
YOURDISTRIBUTION[_VERSION].tgz.
Every install client belonging to the class YOURDISTRIBUTION[_VERSION]
will subsequentially be installed with this other base image.

2) you need to adjust the package lists for the classes you want to
use for other distributions. we currently support yum, yast, yrpmi -
use these instead of the install in "PACKAGES install" in your package
list.
(if you have a class that you use for more than one distribution, you
can still use a single file, as you can have packages choices
depending on classes)

3) sure, you need to check your config scripts, so everything works out fine.

I did some basic tests for these things with fedora, but had some
problems, which now seem to me as being connected to the fact that i
tested the stuff in Xen virtualized systems. But i did have more time
to test these things further.
Basically, it should work fine, and if not, we are quite happy to fix
problems you find fast to get this feature going smoothly.

Henning