Unattended installs, like Win32's winnt.sif feature.

mhertz · **Posted:** Tue Jun 08, 2010 8:22 am

The only thing which I really miss from before I switched to GNU/Linux(Zenwalk), is the ability to do unattended installs by specifying a configuration file to the installer with all the choises pre-selected.

Granted, Zenwalk's installer is brilliant and second-to-none, but still I really dislike doing manual installation to be honest.

Yeah, I know it's a completelly different kinda OS, or rather distro, but nonetheless, Arch Linux's installer features something called AIF (Arch Linux Installation Framework), and which is stated to be written in bash, and as it's also under the GNU license, then you'd not even have to reinvent the wheel much, but simply just reuse relevant portions/techniqes.

Anyway, just wanted to make a feature request about being able to do unattended installs with Zenwalk...

Thanks in advance for considering this request!

(And im not talking about package-selection, but just about pre-configuring/answering other options so as to avoid being asked the same things and entering the same things upon each and every re-install, e.g. users, passwords, partitions, mount-points, filesystems etc. etc. - Also dosen't Slackware has something like that allready with tag files? But i'm not sure if it's only related to package-selection, which i'm not interested in, but only the other options; I dunno, have never installed Slackware in other ways than the default manual way...)

CU, Martin.

Quote:

AIF, the installation tool
Arch Linux uses AIF aka 'Arch Linux Installation Framework' to perform installations.
This tool - written in bash - consists of some libraries to perform various functions (installing packages, setting up disks etc) and some so called procedures which use these libraries to provide an easy means to do an installation or to smaller related tasks ('partial procedures'). These procedures are shipped by default:

interactive: An interactive installation procedure, which asks you some questions, guides you through an installation and helps you configuring the target system by automatically changing some settings for you depending on what you did earlier (eg network settings)
The installed system will initially have only a customisable set of "base" packages installed with whatever utilities and drivers you need to get online.
Then once you've successfully booted the installed system, you'll run a full system upgrade and install any other packages you want. (aliased as /arch/setup)
automatic: An automated, deploy-tool-alike procedure designed for low-to zero interactivity.
uses profiles for configuration of the target system.
See /usr/share/aif/examples/ for example profile files. The examples implement quite generic scenarios but you're free to change them how you like to install extra packages, do configuration tweaks, etc.base: basic, little-interactivity installation with some common defaults.
This procedure is used by the others to inherit from, it is NOT meant to be used directly by end users
partial-configure-network: exposes the network configuration step from the interactive procedure, to help you setup the network in the live environment
partial-disks: Process disk subsystem or do a rollback
partial-keymap: change your keymap/console font settings. (aliased as km)
The benefit of procedures such as partial-keymap and partial-configure-network over direct usage of tools such as loadkeys or ifconfig is that when running the interactive procedure, you will get asked if you want to apply your settings to the config files of the target system.

If you want to go further, you can also:

write your own procedures from scratch or by overriding certain parts of other procedures
write your own libraries, to provide new, reusable functionality
create your own configs for the procedures that support them (eg automatic)
For more information, consult the readme of AIF.

Source: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Off ... ation_tool

Unattended installs, like Win32's winnt.sif feature.

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