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Revision as of 10:47, 17 October 2008 by Michael (talk | contribs) (added info about experimental FAI archive)
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Hello and welcome to the FAI wiki.

This is a public wiki for FAI - Fully Automatic Installation. It is a place for users and developers of FAI to share information. If you have some information on FAI to share, see the page wiki registration - you need to write a mail, because we can't handle the spam otherwise. Also, please read editing rules.

About FAI

FAI is a tool for fully automatic (unless you explicitly wish to get some questions on each install) installation of Debian and other Linux Distributions via network, custom install cd, or into a chroot environment. Some people also use it to install Windows.

FAI works script-based as opposed to full image based (if you wish so, we can also install any kind of image) - so it is very flexible, and can be used to install very heterogeneous infrastructures. It uses a class-based system (think of classes as system types that can be combined with each other, as long as they are not technically conflicting) to define configurations in some simple textfiles.

It is also used to update running systems without completely reinstalling them with the softupdate functionality - so you have one single point of configuration for installation and updates.


getting FAI

if you want the latest and greatest version(instead of the versions contained in Debian apt repositores for the specific version of the distribution):

deb http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/download sarge koeln
deb http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/download etch koeln
deb http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/download lenny koeln
deb http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/download experimental koeln
  • the experimental builds contain patches contributed by the developers that may or may not make it into the official version; the more feedback we get on this one, the likelier it is :-) (see also the on linux-fai-devel
  • install it within debian sid
  • check out the sources from subversion:
svn co svn://svn.debian.org/svn/fai/trunk fai-sources

(will require building the package by entering the directory and do something like "dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot")

  • get the sources from the unofficial Git repository provided by Sebastian Harl:
git clone git://git.tokkee.org/fai.git
git clone http://git.tokkee.org/fai.git

(this repository is automatically synchronized from the SVN repository four times a day)
(as with SVN, this will require building the package by entering the directory and doing something like "dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot")

There are some hints for getting FAI 3.2.X running - there are changes in the boot setup, and the sources.list for server and fai must fit.

documentation and examples

official - from the FAI developer team


Translations of the fai-guide are available, but they are not really up to date (hint: we could use quite some help here!):

user contributed in this wiki

  • TODO:
    • Resources - there are some information resources about FAI available "out there", as well as some unofficial developer branches, that are handled somewhere else until that code is incoporated in the FAI main Branch - and we want to point to them.


FAI in the real world


"third party" articles

Developer information

Wiki Information