Tag Archives: installation

geek howto linux

HOWTO automate Debian installs with preseed

August 18, 2011 – 2:41 pm
Automatic (you know, for the people)

Automatic (you know, for the people)

I’ve installed Linux, probably 100s of times, and while going through all the questions and answers used to be fun, once you have everything decided it’s mainly a case of tab, space, enter, tab, tab, enter, space, space, tab, enter. I remember reading about kickstart, which was Red Hat‘s way of automating the install process, but Debian GNU/Linux (and by extension Ubuntu Linux) support  preseed. From Debian’s wiki, “Preseeding provides a way to set answers to questions asked during the installation process, without having to manually enter the answers while the installation is running. This makes it possible to fully automate most types of installation and even offers some features not available during normal installations.” So preseeding automates the install of the OS, the questions that you’d normally need to answer interactively are predetermined, and defined by a supplied configuration file, and sometimes boot parameters. So while Ubuntu is known for it’s user-friendly OS installer, Ubiquity, preseeding the Debian-Installer  (also known as “d-i”) is the recommended method for automating Ubuntu installations and for building custom install CDs. With this in mind I set out to build a preseed config file that would automate installs of virtual KVM machines we were provisioning at a gig, but looking at how I do such bare-bones base installs, this would work for most of my normal Debian installs at home too.

This is a preview of HOWTO automate Debian installs with preseed. Read the full post (1258 words, 2 images, estimated 5:02 mins reading time)
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geek howto

HOWTO: install Fedora-commons repository software on Debian

March 17, 2009 – 8:25 pm

newlogo2So I’ve been using Fedora-commons for almost a year, first off, no it is NOT the Linux distribution, it is a digital repository used by libraries, museums, etc, worldwide to keep track of their digital collections.  For this Fedora-commons is very good at its job, but there was a steep learning curve when I first jumped in with, a complaint I’ve heard repeated by many who aren’t Java jockeys (just made that up).  Today I had to reinstall Fedora-commons on a new development server, and to be honest I had a couple of missteps along the way as I tried to remember my super cool moves to install this app.  Once something like this happens it’s a prime candidate for a HOWTO, so here is my super, simple HOWTO get Feodora-commons up and running in a development environment in Debian GNU/Linux (I’m running Lenny – 5.0) or Ubuntu Linux.  Notice that for simplicity’s sake, this uses Fedora-commons built in Tomcat implementation, for developing this is fine, for production I highly recommend installing a Tomcat via dpkg/apt-get, or whatever package manager you use, so that any security patches will be available for apt-get to automatically update.  I’ve also set it to use a local MySQL store, change to a different database if you need to.

This is a preview of HOWTO: install Fedora-commons repository software on Debian. Read the full post (480 words, 1 image, estimated 1:55 mins reading time)
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