Hi all,I know things have "stalled" a bit, but I just went through my email through this list. Let me suggest to you Ibuild. ( http://ibuild.livecd.net )
Based on Morphix ( www.morphix.org ) which is a modular derivative of Knoppix, Ibuild allows you to build any amount of profiles with a few clicks after setup. Technically Morphix just uses Knoppix hw detection, and after install, it is Debian. It has a graphical installer that is decent (Click on an icon) and I know that Alex (the inventor) is open to suggestions/code to improve it. You could probably script it to one or two questions. Or, simply a page or two of decent documentation would solve the issue.
Ibuild uses the Morphix base and and bareX.mod.iso (X windows stuff) to start with. You then select what programs you want installed (you can add custom ones, also) and it downloads them directly from deb repositories in the chroot and compresses it all into a neat little iso. Once set up, you can easily tweak settings (bootsplash, homepages, etc) and rebuild quickly. Maintaining several different config files is trivial.
My non profit (which is primarily me, atm) has a KDE, an educational, and an LSTP profile I maintain. Tweaks across all profiles take a few seconds and then rebuild.
Just some thoughts... Kermit Vagrant Cascadian wrote:
could one possible approach be to create a set of packages for tasksel? The task-based installation makes a lot of sense to a lot of the people that I've introduced to Debian. Might a "non-profit server" or "non-profit desktop" option be a viable option?indeed. probably would want more than 2 profiles, though i'm guessing no more than 5.If this isn't appropriate for a core Debian tasksel, could Debian-NP use its own installer with its own tasksel selections?absolutely.through use of tasksel and/or metapackages, we could largely accomplish this. i think this was basically the direction we were headed during debconf. it's really out of date, but we came up with a CD image: http://debian-np.alioth.debian.org/beta/debian-np_20040612.iso it would be great to create an updated CD image, and flesh out more specificly which packages we want to include in which profiles... this may be turning into a conversation more appropriate for the development list: http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-np-devel live well, vagrant