Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-edu (332 mails)

["Chris Howells" <chrish@xxxxxxxxx>]

Michael Brown wrote:

> Not sure that any of us have the resources to create a distro, even if we

> all combine. Our preferred approach is to customise existing distros (in 
> our case, Mandrake, for now). 

Yes, perhaps I didn't quite make this clear enough before ;) I certainly
don't intend to create  a distro from scratch. Just take an existing one
(e.g. Red Hat 7.2, which I chose for a few reasons), rip out the irrelevant
packages (games, GNOME, etc), hack the bootup floppies a bit, and burn a CD
with the new system on.

I'm afraid SuSE is out for a few reasons. The main reason is that SuSE do
not create freely downloadable/reusable ISOs of the system. Addtionally, I
consider SuSEConfig and YaST to be largely a pain in the ar$e.

<snip>

> maintaining an enterprise-wide network of five thousand computers should 
> be barely noticeable.' 
> A few of the features: 
> o Allows installation of workstations with only a floppy disk and two 
> keypresses (the two keypresses are required only as a safety check). No 
> further manual intervention required. 
> o For all servers other than the first: allows installation of servers 
> with only a floppy disk and about 10 keypresses. No further manual 
>intervention required. 
<snip>

> Although the design document is incomplete beyond the specification, the 
> code has passed proof of concept stage and is nearing alpha release. 
> You might find this tool helpful; it's a lot easier to take a 'standard' 
> distro and reconfigure it than it is to repackage everything with your 
> desired configuration. :-) 

Right, this sounds very good :) Have you thought about perhaps taking a
standard distro and adding this stuff to this, burning a CD and
distributing it? This is pretty much what I want to do.

You say that you can install a workstation by only presssing a few keys.
Does this work on all distros (or even FreeBSD?)? If so, how?

> Kickstart is nowhere near flexible enough to be relied upon as a primary 
> distribution method. Believe me; we have tried this type of method for 
> some time and it is not adequate to the task. Essentially, it comes down 
> to a concept flaw shared by many, many systems (including some that I
have 
> written myself): there is a reliance upon a known initial state. 

Ah right. Well, I don't really understand what you mean by this. Would you
mind explaining a little more?

> On the server side, CUPS would be used for the printing system and all 
> machines will have ext3 formatted hard discs. 
Reiser! ;-) 
> * Have a central administration databases where: 
> - User names and groups are managed 
> - Print and disc quotas are managed 
> - Software can be allocated to a machine/group of machines 
> - The central configuration files are located 
> <snip> 
> If any configuration files (e.g. /etc/host or similair) have been
modified, 
> the updated versions would be downloaded. Perhaps CVS could be used here.

> * A database such as NIS would probably be used for the administrative 
> database 
LDAP is more flexible, has many desirable side-benefits and (in theory) 
interoperable with Win2K. 
> It will also be possible to define the desktop menus (e.g. KMenu) that 
> will appear on the user's desktop. This will be based around .desktop 
> files, and a utility will convert these files to Blackbox menus so 
> that the menu is kept consistent between different desktops. 
The Debian menu system (also integrated into Mandrake and probably a few 
other distros) will keep all window manager menus synchronised. Well 
worth a look.