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Hi, On Wed, 11 Feb 1998, Tom Schaefer wrote:
I understand you guys are busy as bees there, but perhaps you could set it up so that experienced users can overide that prompt (ENTER to continue) ; as well as some of the other prompts; for mass rollouts of machines.
I would love to have a screen where I can load all of the custom information; hit GO and walk away.
Imagine being able to load a SuSE boot diskette, have Yast automatically load a pre-defined config on the diskette which points and links the target machine to a distribution server, then begin formatting and installing the custom distribution without any user intervention. A really cool option would be to place a default XF86Config on the diskette as well, and when you return to that machine, when the install is all done automatically, you bump the mouse and you see the xlogin.
This is already almost completely implemented and will hopefully be available in the next release ;-) You will be able to provide a special info file on the bootdisk which contains the information how to partition the disk(s) and how to reach the distribution server. It is possible to get the network configuration from a DHCP or bootpc server and you can even mark additional custom packages for post-install (and you will be able to execute custom post-install scripts as well). YaST on 5.1 has this feature already partially implemented, but as it is not yet complete we did not yet document it. But it did work fine in the past for some big companies here in Germany that want to install hundreds of similar machines without user intervention. If you want to play around, just do the following: mount /dev/fd0 /mnt (mount one of our bootdisks) mkdir -p /mnt/suse/setup/descr Now create a file /mnt/suse/setup/descr/info with the following contents: ----------------- Language: german # "german" or "english" Display: color # "color" or "mono" Keytable: de-lat1-nd Bootmode: CD # Bootmode; Default is "CD"; # Bootmode: Net # Example for NFS installation Cdrom: scd0 # Not really necessary scsi_hostadapter aha1542 # Not yet used IP: 192.168.103.2 Netmask: 255.255.255.0 Gateway: 192.168.103.1 Server: 192.168.102.10 Serverdir: /work/rpm/CD1 Nameserver: 192.168.102.1 Netdevice:eth0 ----------------- umount /mnt and boot with that disk. If you give the kernel parameter "linuxrc=auto" on the LILO prompt, linuxrc will read the info file and try to act accordingly. If Bootmode is "Net" and you do not specify an IP address of the to be installed machine, linuxrc will try to reach a DHCP server to get the info. Please note that this is work in progress. Especially linuxrc does not yet load modules specified in the info file. So, it currently only works if the bootkernel supports all your hardware needed for installation. There is still lots of work to be done. The information needed for YaST will be contained in this file, too. But as this is supposed to change fundamentally, I will not document it right now ;-) Hubert -- To get out of this list, please send email to majordomo@suse.com with this text in its body: unsubscribe suse-linux-e