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.