[CS-FSLUG] Transitions

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Quoting Josiah Ritchie <jritchie at bible.edu>:

> >of volunteers come in and say, "Oh! You need to install the Brandex
> >distro! Every other kind of Linux is rubbish." (Or, they'd want me to
> >use FreeBSD, or whatever.) My reply was invariably, "Fine. You bring
> >in a distro, complete with OpenOffice, E-mail, web browser, and so
> >on, so that I can stick in a CD and let it install itself, and we'll
> >use it." (I wasn't kidding, either. Installing Windows 95, applying
> >the assorted patches and upgrades, then installing Mozilla and
> >OpenOffice, is an incredibly tedious procedure, and we never could
> >get utilities like Ghost to automate the procedure reliably.) Not one
> >ever came back with a CD. 

> different things and replicating an install like you mentioned is
> nearly impossible for any OS. The reason we don't have linux on the

Actually, such can be done for linux with not too much effort using kickstart in
Redhat/Mandrake or Autoyast in SuSE.  When doing a Redhat installation (the
latest I've played with there is 9.0), for example, after installation a
kickstart configuration file with the details of the installation you just did
is saved into root's home directory.  There are also facilities provided to run
postinstallation scripts to handle stuff like adding in security patches.  This
is something that I have thrown together before at work.

There is a similar open-source install deployment method that will work for
Windows 2000/XP (and perhaps others), although I can't quite recall the name.

David