*** System Installer Project ***
SystemInstaller is a tool to install a system with any Linux distribution. It works hand-in-hand with SystemImager and SystemConfigurator to build a cluster.
If you wish to help out in any way, please visit the SystemInstaller home page (http://systeminstaller.sourceforge.net).
*** NOTE ***
System Installer is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License located in the COPYING file of this distribution for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA
Overview and quick tips
For more detailed info on SIS in general, including step by step instructions, see the SIS manpage.
SystemInstaller is a tool to build Linux OS images for use by SystemImager. It is designed to be distributions and architecture independent, although we aren't 100% there yet. After installing the systeminstaller package and optionally, the systeminstaller-x11 package, you can get started.
The easiest (and prettiest) way to go about your installation is to use the SystemInstaller gui, tksis which is in the systeminstaller-x11 package (you did install that, didn't you?) Once you have launched tksis, you can use the panels there to add new images and clients.
Optionally there is a text based interactive interface for defining the necessary components. It is called buildimage and can be run directly from the command line. It will ask a bunch of questions, providing defaults where it makes sense. After buildimage completes you will have an image and clients defined.
There is yet a third option. There is a command line interface for all the SystemInstaller functions. Briefly, these commands are:
-mksiimage Creates a Linux OS image
-mksidisk Creates a disk partition table
-mksirange Creates a range of machines
-mksimachine Edits machine definitions
-mkdhcpconf Creates a dhcpd.conf file
See the man pages for these commands for more detail.
In order to actually install the clients, you will need to either make an autoinstall diskette or CD or setup network booting. See the SystemImager documentation for more details on this setup.
Prerequisites
SystemInstaller is part of the System Installation Suite. As a result it has several prerequisites on other components of SIS(SystemImager and System Configurator). Links to the project pages and hence the downloads can be found at sisuite.org.
Getting and giving help
The SystemInstaller project is hosted on SourceForge. You can view our web page at http://systeminstaller.sourceforge.net/.
We have mailing lists for both users and developers. They can be reached at http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=24005
Please don't hesitate to contact the lists with any questions, comments, or suggestions.
A note about Debian support
Debian support was added to SystemInstaller recently, but since we can't seem to get around the interactive questions that it insists on asking. So it hasn't been actively maintained, most notably, it hasn't been modded to support the new API spec. Hopefully the debconf in the next version of Debian will help with this situation. If you want to still use the Debian stuff, let us know and we'll port it over to the new API.
Here is the original text that was under this item.
Support for .deb packages has recently been added to SystemInstaller, but only at a very minimal level. Systeminstaller can create an image with the base system and any .deb packages which do not require interactive setup. This means you must provide in your package list the base system tarball (base2_2.tgz for debian/stable).
There is a solution to the packages that require interactive setup, and it is coming RSN. The short term solution will force the interactive setup to use the defaults, and the less-short-term-but-not-far-away solution will allow for you to answer the questions as they are prompted by the debian setup.