On Sat, 19 Dec 2009 22:43:17 +0100 Frédéric Perrin <frederic.perrin@resel.fr> wrote:
You've never installed Debian/Ubuntu with a preseed.cfg file that answer all the questions for you (or, at your option, as many or as few questions as you wish)? You've never used FAI (Fully Automated Installed) either? (Well, I haven't, but a friend of mine, an Arch user, did, and he has only good things to say about its flexibility and the ease of setup.)
I love to hate Ubuntu as much as the next guy, but the installer is not somewhere where Arch has an advantage. If you want an easy to use installer, as David pointed out in further in the thread, you go it; if you want to build an ISO that answers all the installer questions, you got it; if you want a setup where you can plug a machine, tell it to boot over the network, go drink a coffee and go back to a system completly installed, you got it.
I have used FAI extensively to mass-install servers. Don't put words in my mouth: my point was that "point and click" installers are not necessarily faster then what we have. BTW: debian/ubuntu installers are complex (in lines of code), especially if you add fai on top of that, which re-implements a lot of things. Dieter