Re: [TCLUG:4460] RedHat 5.2 + Errata + Gnome 1.0 + KDE + More Stuff

["Mark A. Bentley" <bentlema@cs.umn.edu>]

On Thu, 4 Mar 1999, Tim Wilson wrote:
> 
> I recently discovered the kickstart installation option in RH5.2. It
> apparently allows a basic system on cloning workstations. This will be a
> great tool for me with my computer lab if it works as advertised. Can
> anyone vouch for the effectiveness of this type of install?
> 

We're using kickstart here, and it works quite nicely.  There are some
bugs/limitations with the basic kickstart install process.  For one, the
network config part doesn't work correctly when using a BOOTP server.  If
you use BOOTP to give the client its network config, it will ignore the
static network definition, and assume that you want the machine to always
boot with BOOTP.  RedHat knows about this, but they don't seem to be
making kickstart a very high priority.  We've gotten around this problem by
writing our own network config script, which is better anyway since it
keeps the kickstart config file more general.

The way partitions are specified in the kickstart config file could use a
lot of work too...its not very flexible.  

Even with these problems though, kickstart has turned out to be a big
time-saver. Once the whole system is setup, it's just a matter of brining
the floppy up to whatever machine you want to install, and boot with "linux
ks".

--Mark

==========================================================================
Mark A Bentley                  Email:  bentlema@cs.umn.edu
Systems Staff, CSci Dept
University of Minnesota         URL:    http://www.cs.umn.edu/~bentlema/