Fedora 10

[Lonni J Friedman]

On Mon, Dec 8, 2008 at 7:37 AM, Kurt Wall <kwall at kurtwerks.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 07, 2008 at 06:29:31PM -0800, Ken Moffat wrote:
>> Kurt Wall wrote:
>
> [Slackware]
>
>> > Yes. It's grown in number of distribution CDs, but it's still pretty
>> > close to the metal.
>>
>> So they have a netinstall? (small install cd that downloads the rest
>> from the internet?)
>
> I don't think so, but certainly not as part of the official distribution.
> You can definitely do a network install, so it might be possible to cobble
> something together that works over teh intarweb.

About 2.5 years ago I investigate what it would take to install
Slackware in an automated, network fashion.  At the time, there was
nothing official, although there was this horrific 3rd party software
package which provided a mechanism for automating the OS installation
over the network, but it was really fragile, immature & scary.
Unfortunately, it assumed that you'd be doing the installations on the
same exact hardware every time, including the creation of a custom
initrd, as you had to explicitly define all the device drivers.  While
I'd love to think that things have improved since then, this being
Slackware, I doubt it.

Slackware might still be nice for those who want a 'pure' Linux distro
that hasn't been tainted by commercial interests, but its by no means
ready for any enterprise deployment.  No company is going to pay
someone to install Slackware x times manually (over the network or
otherwise) where x is a number greater than 10.


-- 
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L. Friedman                                    netllama at gmail.com
LlamaLand                       https://netllama.linux-sxs.org