[lug] distro versions of kickstart

[D. Stimits]

Alan Robertson wrote:
> D. Stimits wrote:
> 
>> I was wondering, how many distributions have something similar to 
>> Redhat's kickstart? Of those distributions, how many have good 
>> interfaces for designing installs?
> 
> 
> SuSE does (alice).  I expect other RH-clone distros also do.
> 
> There's also the System Installation Suite (SIS) which works for ALL 
> distros.  So, once you learn it, you can use the same method for all.
> 
> Basically with it, you set up a "golden image" using the normal distro 
> tools, and then tell SIS to capture it.  It then can modify it somewhat 
> to fix network data, disk types, and a few other things.  It's not a 
> filesystem image, but a tar image, so things like size of disk, etc. are 
> irrelevant.

So to use SIS, you would basically create an actual install, and then 
dump it's configuration? It sounds like it is an "adaptive cloning" 
device (extraction by example, with knowledge of indivdiual distro quirks).

Kickstart seems to be more of a straight script to semi-automate by 
meta-specification, rather than using an existing install (in fact, this 
seems to be one minor weakness, I can't dump a kickstart config from a 
running system...it creates a kickstart image of a new install right at 
the finish of the install, but can't take into account system changes 
over time). The gui tool for kickstart is even dumber, it won't allow 
you to pick individual packages, and once you exit the program, you 
can't load an existing kickstart file to edit.

Alice sounds like probably it is very close to kickstart. I can't 
imagine Mandrake doesn't have something (and probably python based). Do 
you happen to have a feel for how popular Alice and SIS are, and who 
uses them most?

D. Stimits, stimits AT idcomm.com

> 
>     -- Alan Robertson
>        alanr at unix.sh
> 
> 
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