[Novalug] PCRetro company is drowning in computers

James Ewing Cottrell III JECottrell3@Comcast.NET
Sat Aug 3 02:22:55 EDT 2013


On 7/26/2013 11:14 AM, Derek LaHousse wrote:
> While I know a few things about PXE booting, I would enjoy the
> opportunity to understand how the Debian installer can use an answers
> file.

You could try installing Cobbler from the EPEL repos. Cobler is 
basically a Kickstart (and other things too) wrapper for RHEL and its 
close kin (Fedora, CentOS and Scientific), but also knows about SuSE and 
Ubuntu. I dunno if it knows about Debian tho.

At NIH, we are building a Flash Drive Installer for CentOS, Fedora, 
Ubuntu and Debian. The Ubuntu install requires a few manual steps, and 
the Debian one uses a preseed file rather than Kickstart.

Debian also has a thing called the Fully Automatic Installer, aka FAI, 
but I know nothing about it other than its name.

> I imagine that'd be the fastest way to install on diverse
> hardware, rather than the image one would use on identical hardware.

Yes, but even on identical hardware, PXE/Kickstart is usually the fastest.

> But, old computers are old.  They're power-hungry, they're slow
> (comparatively).  Is there maybe a reason why PCRetro can't move them?

Exactly!

JIM



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