FAI 5.0 released

[Thomas Lange]

After several months of hard work, the FAI team is very happy to
announce the new major release 5.0. These are the most notable changes
in this release:

  * major update and rewrite of the FAI guide
  * new autodiscover function, the client is scanning the network
    for a FAI server
  * FAI profiles extend the FAI class concept
  * FAI shows a curses based menu for selecting a profile on demand
  * ready-to-go setup of the FAI server using the FAI CD or USB stick
  * ready-to-go FAI profile for CentOS 7 and Ubuntu 14.04
  * Cloning machines using an image (hook debconf.IMAGE)
  * new command fai-kvm for starting a virtual machine
  * new command fai-mk-network for setting up different test networks
  * action sysinfo now also mounts lvm and RAID devices
  * use httpredir.debian.org as default
  * fai-cd now uses dracut instead of live-boot,
    use of squashfs creates smaller CD images,
    fai-cd replaces fai-nfsroot2image
  * files *.source are renamed to .sh
  * dnf support for rpm based distributions
  * improved btrfs support
  * fai-cd: no networking for the rescue boot entry by default


The new FAI ISO image now supports the installation of Debian 8 with
XFCE or GNOME desktop, Ubuntu 14.04 and CentOS 7, all using the same
ISO image. When installing XFCE or GNOME, all packages are already
available on the installation media and no network access is
needed. When installing Ubuntu and CentOS, the software packages will
be downloaded from the internet.

There's a smaller ISO (for a CD) image which only includes the XFCE
packages on the CD. But you can also install the other Linux
distributions with this image. The packages and basefiles are then
downloaded from the internet. All installation images can be used for
an USB stick.

    http://fai-project.org/fai-cd/


Two new videos show the automated installation of a FAI server and the
simultaneous installation of four clients with Debian 8 (XFCE and
GNOME), Ubuntu 14.04 and CentOS 7.

https://youtu.be/POOuZdWmnqA
https://youtu.be/btbqz_hVfpo


New screenshots and the videos are available at
http://fai-project.org/screenshots/

You will get the new version if you add this line to your sources.list file:
     deb http://fai-project.org/download jessie koeln

This release is tested with Debian 8 aka jessie.

enjoy the new features of FAI 5.0

Kerim and Thomas