http://lists.q-linux.com/pipermail/plug/2004-June/034730.html

Wed Jun 30 07:40:44 PHT 2004

> There's one thing I'd like to see in dselect though: let it mutate
> from just a package manager to a full-scale installer system suitable
> for system cloning

Although I don't know if any of them are quite what you expect, there are a number of pretty good automatic installation systems available for Debian (sort of like kickstart). I personally use FAI[1] which has a class-based system that allows you to very flexibly design a fully automatic installation system for Debian machines.

Some alternative tools exist, although I have yet to find time to try them out and compare them with FAI. There's autoinstall[2], and Replicator[3]. There may be others, but I haven't quite found them yet.

So far I'm pretty happy with the flexibility of FAI, although Replicator looks interesting enough to make me want to look into it in detail when I have the time.

Federico Sevilla