FAI multi-distribution

Status

It is possible to install other distributions than Debian and dpkg-based ones with FAI. There's an experimental release, which you can get with the apt sources.list line

  deb http://faiwiki.informatik.uni-koeln.de/download/fai-multi-distribution/debian/ experimental/ 

if you're brave. Try it and tell me if it worked for you, or talk about it on the mailing list. You can help to improve it just by reporting things that don't work.

More info on the development of these features: Development_plan#fai-multi-distribution

The code should be fully compatible to FAI 2.9, you should be able to re-use your existing config space with no changes, just some additional classes for the additional distribution, defining different packages and some different installation procedures. It only needs one nfsroot for all.

requirements

• you should have a debian and ubuntu mirror on your mirrohost, otherwise additional script- or config-editing will be required.
• it can help if you had previous exposure to FAI, but is not necessarily much harder than get into FAI with Debian sarge only.

usage

• install the deb's from the download location, including the package fai-distributions (look into it to see what it is about), after adding the apt line to your sources.list, just type

 apt-get update
 apt-get install fai-distributions fai-quickstart

• do everything you'd do with any other FAI install - read this wiki on how to do that.
• copy example classes as usual in FAI
• copy additional example classes:

 cp -a /usr/share/doc/fai-distributions/classes/*/* /usr/local/share/fai/

• there's some problem with non-executable hooks, do:

 chmod +x /usr/local/share/fai/hooks/*

• check configuration in

 /etc/fai-distributions/

• run

 mkdir /tmp/fai
 make-fai-nfsroot

• run

 sh /usr/lib/fai-distributions/ubuntu_hoary/make-base-tgz

( in lib because it should be called from make-fai-nfsroot)

• run /usr/lib/fai-distributions/ubuntu_breezy/make-base-tgz
• run /usr/lib/fai-distributions/mandriva/make-base-tgz (this currently just downloads a base system image. This task needs to be solved.
• name your install clients sarge, hoary, and breezy, or mandriva in DNS , or add them to the same classes as these example host configurations and install them as usual
• for mandriva, you need a mandriva mirror at the location specified in files/etc/apt/sources.list/MANDRIVA and in /etc/fai/distributions
• in general, check the config files in /etc/fai-distributions
• for mandriva, I have no network suppport in my tests, until I manually add the module for my card to the config - ubuntu and debian do that well
• also for mandriva, the X config isn't working

missing features

• runs only on Debian sarge as server and is only tested on i386 architecture
• only network install is tested - cd install is some more work to do.
• not tested running on an Ubuntu server. also "normal" FAI has issues running on Ubuntu Linux.
• in general, FAI itself has not yet been proted to run on any other distribution.

errata

• MANDRIVA: problem with grub menu.lst - you'll need a file files/boot/grub/menu.lst/HOSTNAME to get a proper menu.lst
• UBuntu HOARY: does only work with an ubuntu mirror on

 ftp://$mirrorhost/ubuntu

• Ubuntu hoary: does only work with modified instsoft.UBUNTU hook
• FAI 2.9 general: /etc/fai/sources.list must have an entry to a repository which has fai-nfsroot available
• /usr/local/share/fai/files/boot/grub/menu.lst/postinst seems to have a bug within the script. I had to change the line where the variable GROOT is defined to the following one (because a wrong path to device2grub was supplied)

GROOT=$(/usr/bin/device2grub $BOOT_PARTITION)

subversion access

You can also get the latest subversion stuff by checking out

svn co svn://svn.debian.org/svn/fai/people/lazyboy/fai-distributions

and

svn co svn://svn.debian.org/svn/fai/people/lazyboy/fai-2.9-multidistribution

Then going into each of the two new directories and make dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot.