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Date: Wed, 17 May 2000 19:18:15 +0200
> Dpkg vs RPM > Both managability and build packages. I have heard a lot > of "good things" about dpkg.
Have a look at http://www.kitenet.net/~joey/pkg-comp/ for a detailed overview by Joey Hess of various package management formats.
> Customization of the distro > We do a lot of customization to our distro. Can this easily > be done with debian?
Sure. And if you think your customisations may make sense for others as well, don't forget that Debian is developed in an open fashion, so you may want to submit patches to the package maintainers, or perhaps even volunteer to maintain some packages yourself.
Ray
Dpkg beats RPM hands down for anyone who has to actualy administer a number of boxes and wants everything as automatic as possible (for upgrades).
As far as being able to customize the distro - go all out. You can of course edit config files at the "vi" level ;) There are also tools to take the administration of a large number of machines to an even higher level.
I don't know if the mass installs is a possibility. I imagine it depends on your idea of an automated install.
Nathan
> >Autoinstall (Red Hat's kickstart) > > This is also something fairly important. We need this as we do a > > lot of mass installs. > > For mass installs, just make a standard issue CD, boot from that CD, > and copy over the OS. Or you could even make a disk image and dd it > onto the hard drive. That assumes you have the same hard drive in all > the machines. You can turn a 20GB drive into a 10GB drive. :) But > even if you have 4 or 5 different hard drives in your organization, > using disk images will still save you tons of time.
even better, you can make a tar.gz image of your "standard install", stick it on an nfs server and then create a boot floppy with nfs support.
when building a new box, boot with the floppy, partition the disk (scriptable using sfdisk), mount the nfs drive, untar the archive, and then run a script which customises whatever needs to be customised (e.g. hostname, IP address, etc). then run lilo to make it bootable from the hard disk.
alternatively, put it on a CD-ROM and make that CD bootable - just insert the CD and reboot for a fully-automated install. say 10 meg or so for boot kernel & utilities, leaves you up to around 640MB of compressed tar.gz containing your standard install file-system image.
btw, this tar.gz idea is how the debian base system is installed on a machine in the first place. the only significant difference is that you're installing your own tar.gz system image rather than the standard base.tar.gz.
automating debian installs is pretty easy - IF you have a good understanding of how debian works.
craig sanders
> > I agree - dpkg and apt are great compared to rpm's. However, that's all > > assuming that there are debian packages out there that are up to date > > (which they're generally not).
>Actually, unstable is usually pretty close to up-to-date. I know (of) >quite a few people who run unstable on their production boxes; they just >do a little bit of in-house testing first.
The only real difference between stable and unstable is that unstable has up to date packages. The only thing stable has over unstable is the track history of "yeah all this stuff has worked together for a LONG time".