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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.
Debconf