WEBVTT

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Today, I talk about FAI.me, which is a
build for images.

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First, anybody that never heard anything
about FAI?

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Ok

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I started this project in 1999.

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I'm not sure…

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No, I'm sure that during those times, the
Debian installer did not have

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the preseeding stuff, so we needed
something automatically.

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I installed the first cluster with FAI and
I always do talks on FAI or

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today in the lightning talks, I talk
a little bit about dracut,

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which is used in FAI.

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So, what was the motivation.

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A neighbour of mine, she came to me with

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"My Windows desktop is broken,
can you reinstall it?"

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And in the end, I installed her Linux,
and I was shortly thinking about

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"Should I use FAI for installing her
desktop with Linux?"

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And in the end, I did not use it because
FAI is too complicated,

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like the Debian installer, I guess it's
not really that easy for beginners

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because there are a lot of questions

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but also FAI is not really for beginners.

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So this was the motivation about thinking
about FAI.

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The target group was always advanced
sysadmins

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but I thought maybe it's possible to make
FAI usable also for people

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that are not that advanced sysadmins.

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The idea is that an installer should cover
most installations.

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The Debian installer is really perfect
because I think it covers

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all different kinds and strange environments

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You can do a lot of things, you can configure
very strange combination of language,

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keyboard layout and so on

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but I was thinking about an installer
that covers 90 or 95% of the installations

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A lot of special cases can be ignored and
since the Debian installer has like

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more than 20 questions, I thought it would
be much nicer if there were only

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3 to 5 questions and I looked at Linux Mint
and Mageia installers, CentOS installer,

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and they all ask much less questions.

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In the Debian installer, we sometimes
have also things that are asked

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during the installation, so not everything
is asked at the very beginning.

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For example, the task selection, where you
select your desktop,

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is done after the base installation.

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This was also very important, I would like
to have something that

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asks everything at the very beginning.