Fully Automatic Installation - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Fully Automatic Installation (FAI) is a non-interactive system
to install the Debian

Debian

Debian is a computer operating system composed of software packages released as free and open source software primarily under the GNU General Public License along with other free software licenses. Debian GNU/Linux, which includes the GNU OS tools and Linux kernel, is a popular and influential...

computer operating system

Operating system

An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...

and other
distributions unattended on a single computer or a whole cluster.
FAI uses a collection of Perl

Perl

Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions and become widely popular...

and shell script

Shell script

A shell script is a script written for the shell, or command line interpreter, of an operating system. It is often considered a simple domain-specific programming language...

s for the installation process. Changes to the configuration files of the operating system can be made by cfengine

Cfengine

CFEngine is a popular open source configuration managementsystem, written by Mark Burgess.Its primary function is to provide automated configuration and...

, shell, Perl and expect

Expect

Expect is a Unix automation and testing tool, written by Don Libes as an extension to the Tcl scripting language, for interactive applications such as telnet, ftp, passwd, fsck, rlogin, tip, ssh, and others. It uses Unix pseudo terminals to wrap up subprocesses transparently, allowing the...

scripts.

There is a PHP

PHP

PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document...

based graphical frontend GOsa (not only) for FAI, which is used by the City of Munich

Munich

Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...

at their migration to Linux.

See also