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. -- Tzafrir Cohen | tzaf...@jabber.org | VIM is http://tzafrir.org.il | | a Mutt's tzaf...@cohens.org.il | | best ICQ# 16849754 | | friend -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
