Re: Integrate Knoppix in Debian (was: Re: Debian Enterprise?)
On Mon, 1 Dec 2003, Anthony Towns wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 01, 2003 at 10:12:05AM +0800, Niall Young wrote:
> > > It should be possible to tell FAI about all the packages we want on our
> > > LiveCD, do the install, then do similar stuff to what fai-bootcd does
> > I'd rather do the install in userspace than need another disk for a full
> > install as a pre-requisite to building a live CD, if that's what you
> > meant.
>
> I don't understand what you mean by "userspace". You seem to be using it
> to talk about the existing directory structure, rather than partitioning,
> formatting and mounting a new disk?
Sorry, wrong term - yes I just meant to perform an fai installation into a
local chroot instead of a new disk. Should just require a few hooks to skip
disk partitioning etc. and then we get a single install method for both
live CDs and regular disk hosts.
> I'm assuming that anything you can do from a clean reboot from an FAI
> NFS root, you should be able to do from an existing Debian install with
> fai installed.
Not sure what you mean here. You could do a clean bootdisk/d-i install and
manually configure everything with the same result as an fai install with
the appropriately configured classes. Installing fai will allow you to
create the nfsroot and act as an install server, is that what you meant?
I don't particularly care what tools we use, as long as we minimise
duplication of effort - fai seems the obvious choice for defining
flavour/custom subsets of Debian, and is a good install method for now.
Everyone else seems to be concentrating on their own initrd solution,
and Debix sounds like the way to go if it's multi-arch (didn't realise
it was). Mandated debconf with pre-seeding or some kind of db proxy
allows us to perform non-interactive installs, I guess this will become
a greater priority as d-i matures. At the moment any interactive package
configuration can halt fai and requires workarounds. Live CDs could
also contain an fai server installation to replicate themselves to disk,
eventually d-i using the same type of debconf/class defintions. That's
just where I see it going, I wish I had more spare time this year to
have taken it further.
How about we start a debian-flavours/debian-custom list to take this
further and nut it out once and for all? Every subproject has its own
goals and preferences, we just need to agree on the common requirements
and how they should integreate with d-i.
> > That was the original plan but woody wasn't suitable for this and fai
> > isn't working with sarge yet. =20
>
> WTF? Whyever not?
See the linux-fai list archives, I keep bringing it up but Thomas is
concentrating on supporting woody with all new versions. Few seem
to agree that synchronising releases with Debian, with a branch for
testing/unstable, is a good idea.
Niall Young Chime Communications Pty Ltd
niall@chime.net.au Level 6, 263 Adelaide Terrace
Ph: (+61) 08 9213 1330 / 0408 192 797 Perth, Western Australia 6000
"donate to our Charity of the month which is the Eating Disorders
Association of WA Inc. ... give a gold coin donation and I'll reward
you with nice sweettttt chocolate! MMMMM"
-- Jodie Evans, Feb 2003
Reply to: