Automatically Installing Linux from Bootable CD?

phorm asks: "While there are newer many distributions of linux that come bootable from CD, I've found that some are a bit difficult to customize and wonder how hard it would be to create my own. Currently we are looking at replacing some of our Windows desktops at work with Linux test-machines - and it would be nice to make the installation process as simple as possible. How hard would it be to create a bootable CD that would automagically install Linux onto the first detected hard-drive? How would you go about 'imaging' an existing machine to use as the base? I suppose that in many cases a tar-gzip of the entire OS would work, provided you could partition the drive correctly, recreate some important handles as in /proc, and run lilo/grub to install a boot loader. Does anyone here have experience with this? I know morphix/knoppix make nice bootable distros but what I really want is a basic Linux bootCD which installs a preconfigured version of the OS of my choice."

Comments

Debian: Fully Automatic Installation

[korpiq]

FAI (http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/) is a system that can be used to automatically install Debian on any kinds of different machinery (you define the differentiating classes yourself). Documentation on its site states that "Booting and installing from CD-ROM is in progress".

If you happen to need that level of complexity, maybe you can lend in a helping hand for them to finish that CD-ROM version.

Just thought FAI would deserve to be mentioned here along with all the others. It might very well be overly complex for your purposes.