Re: distribution customization

[John Summerfield <debian herakles homelinux org>]

David Cantrell wrote:

> But the more I think about this, the more it sounds like anaconda is 
> headed down the road of becoming a generic install tool like 
> InstallShield or something similar rather than specific to our 
> distributions.  Or even specific to installing a distribution.  And I 
> think that would be interesting.  Why not aim for that?  On that 

One thing Red Hat lacks is an integrated configuration management tool.

Some time ago (a couple of years or more, probably) I described (on 
Nahant I think) what I thought was needed.

later, I had a look at SUSE and discovered I was more-or-less describing 
YAST.

YAST does the installation, and it can configure the system (as Anaconda 
does) at that time, and it can be invoked later (as Anaconda can't) to 
configure hardware, software, services etc etc. One of its nice features 
is that, if I try to configure something (eg my wireless) that requires 
software to be installed (eg drivers), then it offers to install that 
software. It's also easily extended, just by dropping stuff into the 
right directory.

One of its abilities is to install (SUSE) Linux from the running system 
- handy for chroot environments, Xen etc.

Bill, I suggest you "survey the opposition" by downloading SUSE 10.2 and 
installing it onto some of your systems, to see what ideas it embodies 
that are worth pinching.





--

Cheers
John

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