Re: Why did you chose Debian over CentOS?
On Fri, Mar 06, 2009 at 09:48:27AM -0500, Joe McDonagh wrote:
> At the risk of starting a huge religious war:
>
> 1. Preseed vs. kickstart
>
> If you're only running at home or only a few machines at work, you're
> not going to run into this. Once you're done a RH install a .ks file is
> dropped under /root. You can now use this file to kickstart identical
> machines in PXE in a couple of minutes. There is no such automatic
> generation in Debian.
RTFM http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/apbs03.html.en
An alternative method is to do a manual installation and then, after
rebooting, use the debconf-get-selections from the debconf-utils package
to dump both the debconf database and the installer's cdebconf database
to a single file:
$ debconf-get-selections --installer > file
$ debconf-get-selections >> file
However, a file generated in this manner will have some items that
should not be preseeded, and the example file is a better starting place
for most users.
> You have to create the preseed by hand, and
> testing a preseed file isn't so fun as you need to pretty much reboot ->
> test over and over after you change stuff.
When I needed to mess with kickstart a while ago I had to spend a number
of troubleshooting cycles just to get the right list of packages to add.
There's a nice place you can list them. But the installer will not
resolve dependencies :-(
Furthermore, I couldn't figure out a way to just ass an extra yum source
and also get packages from there. As a result we had to do that in a
post-install script. At the moment we have a very complex logic in a
post install script.
With preseed I just feed it an extra packages source, the list of
packages I really want, and that's all.
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