Today, I talk about FAI.me, which is a build for images.
First, anybody that never heard anything about FAI?
Ok
I started this project in 1999.
I'm not sure…
No, I'm sure that during those times, the Debian installer did not have
the preseeding stuff, so we needed something automatically.
I installed the first cluster with FAI and I always do talks on FAI or
today in the lightning talks, I talk a little bit about dracut,
which is used in FAI.
So, what was the motivation.
A neighbour of mine, she came to me with
"My Windows desktop is broken, can you reinstall it?"
And in the end, I installed her Linux, and I was shortly thinking about
"Should I use FAI for installing her desktop with Linux?"
And in the end, I did not use it because FAI is too complicated,
like the Debian installer, I guess it's not really that easy for beginners
because there are a lot of questions
but also FAI is not really for beginners.
So this was the motivation about thinking about FAI.
The target group was always advanced sysadmins
but I thought maybe it's possible to make FAI usable also for people
that are not that advanced sysadmins.
The idea is that an installer should cover most installations.
The Debian installer is really perfect because I think it covers
all different kinds and strange environments
You can do a lot of things, you can configure very strange combination of language,
keyboard layout and so on
but I was thinking about an installer that covers 90 or 95% of the installations
A lot of special cases can be ignored and since the Debian installer has like
more than 20 questions, I thought it would be much nicer if there were only
3 to 5 questions and I looked at Linux Mint and Mageia installers, CentOS installer,
and they all ask much less questions.
In the Debian installer, we sometimes have also things that are asked
during the installation, so not everything is asked at the very beginning.
For example, the task selection, where you select your desktop,
is done after the base installation.
This was also very important, I would like to have something that
asks everything at the very beginning.