[Beowulf] Parallel Development Tools

[Andrew M.A. Cater]

Subject: Re: [Beowulf] Parallel Development Tools

On Wed, Oct 17, 2007 at 08:59:41PM +0200, Jon Tegner wrote:
> Robert G. Brown wrote:
>> Fedora installs in the future will be done by yum.  Yum enables
>> something that is truly marvelous for people who have to install through
>> thin pipes (e.g. DSL links): a two stage interruptable install.  It is
>> possible to install a barebones system in the first pass in a relatively
>> short period of time and have it come up on the second boot and run yum
>> to complete the rest of the install.  Yum is robust, more or less,
>
Use a Debian netinst CD - 118MB or so. That installs a base system
and you can then reboot. It's about six questions or so using the 
"expert" install - and that includes setting up users.

> Agree. This two stage install is the logical step. After the first step, 
> the second could well be controlled by a "package-file" where the desired 
> packages are listed, and all dependencies are taken care of by yum/apt. If 
> a package name is later added or removed in that file, a cron-job could see 
> to that it is removed from or added to the system. Would be easy to keep a 
> lot of boxes in sync this way.

You mean

"dpkg --get-selections >> myselectionsfile" from one box and 

"dpkg --set-selections < myselectionsfile" on the other?

This works even where the machines are different architectures - I was 
able to do this where one was an AMD64 and one was a Sparc with minimal 
changes.

[There is also an equivalent which will preseed the debconf answers
but I can't remember that off the top of my head]

If you want a full system once you're done including X Windows and 
CD/DVD burning and the ability to add modules for firmware etc.

"aptitude install kde xserver-xorg kdm k3b build-essential 
module-assistant"

Disclaimer: I can claim to have _named_ apt :)

Andy