-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 > > All of this is the "easy" part :-). The hard part is finding an > extensible, well-maintained diskless Linux distro with a rich set of > drivers. I do not have the luxury of just supporting the hardware > which I personally happen to have. > > This is the big advantage of the DOS boot disk combined with PXE > booting: No drivers.
And as we move forward in time, just about every network card supports pxe2.x Which has nice boot functionality. I'm not sure about the wisdom in moving away from this for network installs. It's easy and fast :) > > > DOS is far too limited to fully automate a Windows OS deployment. > > For instance, it would be nice to partition the drive then proceed > > to formatting it without having to reboot. Linux does this quite > > well. > > Absolutely. That is the Plan. > On network installs, a reboot doesn't cost anything... :) I have a successful automation of build scripts. This is a problem with floppy and cdrom installs. I think in the short term, package management is potentially the bigger fish to fry here. And especially adding applications after the initial system install... (I want to and will be working on this as time goes on, makes my life even easier, don't have to wait so long for machines to totally rebuild) > > > I'm presently looking at Windows PE as alternative to DOS; however, > > using Linux to script a Windows OS installation would be awesome. > > Windows PE is certainly the most "Microsofty" approach. And it has > the advantage of creating and writing NTFS partitions directly. But > WinPE also costs money, which is somewhat contrary to the spirit of > this project. > Much Badness :) > --- > > Wolfgang Borst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > if the script is permitted to install, it will do the following things: > > > > - partition the hardisk [parted > > http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/parted.html] > > - creating fat32 fileystems [parted] > > Parted is awesome. And the maintainer (Andrew Clausen) is very smart > and very responsive. > > > - make the machine bootable (using w98/command.com)[ms-sys > > http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/ms-sys.html] > > Aren't there licensing issues with w98/command.com? > > I would really, really like to use FreeDOS instead. Too bad winnt.exe > doesn't like it. (By the way, would anybody like to volunteer to help > me fix this? Requirements are that you know how to compile things, > that you know or can learn how to use CVS, and that you are willing to > go through a tedious cycle searching for the FreeDOS kernel patch > which broke things.) Maybe, I'll look into it, to see if I want to take it further. > > > - copy the files > > - customize unattend.txt > > > > after that the machine is rebootet, starts the w98/command.com and > > starts the windows xp setup. > > I am planning to run winnt.exe under dosemu instead, to avoid the > extra file copy and to avoid ever actually booting into DOS. Other > than that, however, my approach will be similar. > > > - mysqld stores informations about the clients (mac-address, is the > > machine to be installed ..), about the software(which installscript is > > used for software xyz, which software is part of the group 'base > > installation' ). > > I hope to make the system extensible enough to permit this, but I > doubt I will include it by default. We want people to be able to > start using the system as quickly as possible. > I have plans here, just need to get my perl and modules up to script, and you can plug into anything you like :) as long as you have a network, hope you do, that's the whole plan :) Russell Smith -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.1 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQE+8FpWcLk2TbmyMuIRAqB+AJ4/NctDwqkF56blZPh62fUnlb+s4QCfetJ4 jML4ZsNmmKnD4guC+mNiu5Q= =Citu -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: INetU Attention Web Developers & Consultants: Become An INetU Hosting Partner. Refer Dedicated Servers. We Manage Them. You Get 10% Monthly Commission! INetU Dedicated Managed Hosting http://www.inetu.net/partner/index.php _______________________________________________ unattended-info mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/unattended-info
