[arch-general] Arch Linux automatic (prescripted) installer/deployment tool

[Dieter Plaetinck]

Aaron Griffin wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 2:17 PM, Dieter Plaetinck <dieter at plaetinck.be> wrote:
>   
>> Hi all,
>> I've started working on a new procedure for AIF called 'automatic'.
>> With automatic I don't mean a newbfriendly installer that automatically
>> configures your xorg etc.
>> I rather mean an installer that you pass a small configfile (disk layout,
>> package list,...) so it can work non-interactively to setup your system
>> exacty the way you want.
>>
>> I hope I/we can someday implement such automatic installation in two ways:
>> - an environment that gets loaded through by pxe booting and can work
>> without any user input at all.
>>  Best case scenario we can generate such an environment like we generate cd
>> iso's, and we automatically start aif with the automatic procedure.
>>  A sufficient live network config will be done (the bios will use dhcp
>> before pxe booting) and the config file for the procedure can be made
>> available for example by the user himself who generated the pxe environment.
>>  (low prio for me personally but maybe someone is interested in this, it's
>> something to keep in mind)
>> - we use the installer cd with AIF on it, you boot it and start "aif -p
>> automatic" yourself. 2 more manual things need to happen:
>>  * Network config (for that I plan to write a simple script that uses the
>> aif libraries)
>>  * getting the config file for the automatic procedure
>>  After that, the automatic procedure can work independently.
>>
>>
>> Given the modular, reusable code base we already have now, this should be
>> fairly easy to implement (although I still need to work more on aif, the way
>> pacman functions are exposed etc)
>>
>> Does anyone have thoughts, ideas, requirements, ...?
>>     
>
> Decent network config capability that includes wireless would be very
> useful. Also, this seems very close to quickinst, if you haven't
> looked at that.
>   
AFAIK Quickinst is quite different: it _doesn't_do several things (which 
are assumed to be done manually) such as configuring partitions, 
filesystems, mounting them etc.
And quickinst aim is to install a "common defaults" setup with just the 
base packages, with sane defaults etc.

The goal of my deployment tool is automate everything as much as 
possible, while being tightly controlled (package list, specific 
configurations etc)

Dieter
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