Hello! Long ago, I made an announcement about paella, a project that I had just started to develop: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2003/09/msg01585.html During much of this time, running paella required a small network of machines holding the infrastructure necessary to do automated installs. Times have changed since then. Almost one year ago, I purchased a laptop for about $670. The laptop came with a dual-core cpu, 3G of ram, and a large hard drive. Once I got the laptop, I decided it was time to start using virtual machines to provide an infrastructure for working with paella. I started to create a new quickstart guide that helps bootstrap a minimal infrastructure that paella could work within. I feel that since the newer computers have sufficient resources to power a small virtual network, it would be easier for people to get started with paella. Paella has been moved, since the initial announcement. It is now located here: http://paella.berlios.de/ I'm not experienced in advertising or marketing, so the website is a bit dull. It should contain enough documentation to give a good idea of what paella is, how it's designed, and how to use it. The quickstart guide is located here: http://paella.berlios.de/docs/quickstart-vbox.html I have tried to write the quickstart document to guide the reader as quickly as possible to ending up with a minimum infrastructure required to use paella. At the end of the guide, once the preparations are made, a quick tutorial on using paella helps the reader install another virtual machine very similar to the one built during the first part of the install. It should take about 2-3 hours to complete the quickstart guide. Short of uploading a pre-made disk image somewhere, I can't figure out a more convenient method of starting out with paella. In the beginning, when I started paella, there were very few tools that existed to help with making local debian repositories, or live nfsroot systems. As a result, I spent a good deal of time implementing my own solutions to these problems. As time went by, and better tools became available, I started to prune the code in favor of some of those tools. With the help of tools, like reprepro and live-helper, I can now concern myself with just the installation and data management aspects of paella, which really helps. At this time, the most important parts of paella are complete. The database schema is fairly stable, and not likely to change in any way that's important. The structure of the xml files is also pretty solid, and also not likely to change in any appreciable way. Most of the management gui is complete, at least enough to not have to use another database manager (or straight SQL) for most common operations. The installer objects have also been redesigned and tested quite a bit. The operation of the installers is not likely to change, but some steps may be added or removed, although most likely not in a way that would break most configurations. In the past, it may have seemed that paella was dead. This is mostly because I'm not very vocal when it comes to advocating it, and I've not put very much documentation online. Since 2004, I have used paella to install many servers and a few desktops for small businesses. So, paella has been used in a working environment, and it has helped me earn some money. It's no magic bullet, as it can take quite a while to create and test a configuration, however once you have things set up, the time it took to create the configuration can really pay off. This is a good time for people who might be interested in paella to take a good look at what's been accomplished, and for those who would like to use it, to help direct the rest of the work that will need to be done before a stable 1.0.0 version is released. I have a page where the future direction of paella is described: http://paella.berlios.de/docs/plans.html I want to thank all the debian developers for creating a very good system that makes it easier for me to do the work that I've been doing. In the last few years, the focus on using debconf, and getting packages to install without manual intervention has allowed me to remove quite a number of hacks that used to be used to coerce some packages to be installed without intervention. This has helped me concentrate more on getting packages configured, rather than have the time divided between getting the package installed correctly, and then configuring the package. I haven't had to use an expect script in a long time now! -- Thanks: Joseph Rawson
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