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Re: Installing Debian on many PCs



On Wed, Apr 29, 1998 at 04:33:09PM -0000, Hubert Tonneau wrote:
> I am the manager of the computing department in a
> french company. We are currently running most servers
> under OS/2 witch had been chosen in 1992 and are
> now planning to move to Linux.
> 
> I am very pleased with the Debian dpkg command line
> utility that enables to write trivial scripts for
> upgrading a set of machines, and the consistency
> of the Debian distibution.
> 
> On the other hand, though very easy to use, the
> installation of the base system is not convienient
> for a large set of computers since it still lacks
> the ability to add an ascii file on the rescue
> disk that would provide all the necessery
> informations to the installation script.
> (I think this is called kickstart on Red Hat 5)
> 
> Do you plan to provide such a feature, or is there
> a trick to get around it ?

There is a mechanism to tell dselect which packages are preselected.
This could not only be used to provide a list of possible preselected
types (network server, workstation, xterminal etc.) but also to
read in such a list.

I suppose you'll do the following:

a) Install one machine with all the packages you like

b) Get the selection with
   dpkg --get-selections > my.selection

c) Install the next machine
   Quit dselect after you specified the access method

d) Add the selection from the other machine with
   cat my.selection | dpkg --set-selections

e) Run dselect to install the files.  Of if you need batch mode
   mount /pub/debian under /mnt and then
   cd /mnt
   dpkg -iGROEB hamm/hamm hamm/contrib hamm/non-free

Regards,

	Joey

-- 
 / Martin Schulze                      http://home.pages.de/~joey/
/ Linux - the choice of a GNU generation          joey@linux.de /

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