The best is Kickstart, but when it is not possible to use it (too
different machines, distro w/o Kickstart) I do more or less the
following:
Prepare the copying:
- Install one machine completely and make a boot disk for it
- Connect the installed machine to your local network
Do this for every copy copy:
- Connect a second PC with blank HD to your network
- Boot the machine with a rescue CD (CD of MDK 7.1, or SuSE, or some
of these credit-card rescue CDs which you get on every Linux fair.
- partition the harddisk with 'fdisk' and format it with 'mkfs' and
'mkswap'.
- Make it known for the first machine by entering it in roots
.rhosts,
/etc/hosts and /etc/hosts.equiv
- Get access to the network entering
hostname [your hostname]
ifconfig eth0 inet [your IP] netmask [your netmask]
route add default gw [your gateway IP]
- Test the access with 'netstat -nr', 'ping [IP of first PC]'
- Make mountpoints and mount all disk partitions, so that the later
root directory will be /mnt.
- Copy the 'root' partition
cd /mnt
rsh [IP of first PC] '(tar -cvplf - /)' | tar -xvpf -
- Copy the other partitions
cd /mnt
rsh [IP of first PC] '(cd / ; tar -cvplf - usr)' | tar -xvpf -
cd /mnt/usr
rsh [IP of first PC] '(cd /usr ; tar -cvplf - local)' | tar
-xvpf -
cd ..
- Adapt the configuration files (they are in /mnt/etc/... now) and
edit /mnt/etc/inittab to start in a non-graphical run mode.
- Boot the PC with the boot disk of the first PC, ignore all error
messages.
- Edit /etc/lilo.conf end enter 'lilo' to make the PC bootable.
- Configure sound, graphics, network, printers, and so on with the
Maandrake tools.
- Boot the PC and all should work.
Link World wrote:
>
> I am a system OEM in Bangalore,India selling systems bundled with
> Mandrake Linux. The problem is that with every system I sell, I need to
> install & configure the system which takes HOURS!. Can I do a diskcopy
> instead?
>
> Please Help. This is a major bottleneck for me.
>
> SUNIL GUPTA
> LinkWorld.
