Hi, a requirement to use LINBO in Debian Edu is that LINBO is in Debian. Something which builds 20 MB binary packages out of 1.2 GB sources will very very probably never be in Debian, so until this has changed, this aspect of the discussion is kind of useless ;-) (Never say never though.) Also, I think (and I have been dealing with such and other installers since >10 years) that image installers are technically inferior. Keeping them up2date is a lot of work which cannot really be automated, so it's also error prone. But foremost the biggest problem is, that noone really knows whats inside an image and how it was done. And, we already have two installation systems in place: first, the normal d-i installer, with or without PXE, can be extended quite heavily with preseeding. Second, we have Gosa² and FAI. FAI is a package+script based installer so each installation is done from source, not from images, so changes are easy to do and redo (and thus to reproduce and change). Also a single machine installation from scratch (as FAI does) is not much slower than deploying a ready made image: ie. in 2007 a 2.6ghz system with 2600 MB software was installed in 15min, installing 20 such systems only took 17min in total! An image installer might be faster for a single machine installation, but I bet (based on experience + knowing whats going on on the network...!) that it's slower for 20 installations in parallel. I'd like to get real numbers on this though ;) (I've got plenty of numbers on FAI installation speed, none on Linbo though.) Gosa² allows to group machines into different FAI classes and supports installation _and updating_ existing machines. And, FAI+Gosa² are available in Debian already. cheers, Holger
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