Wouldn’t it be great to have a kickstart option for the Ubuntu Live CD?
First, kickstart is very convenient. I’ve been using kickstart to install Red Hat and Fedora machines. A kickstart script is a kind of ‘answer file’ containing the answers to the questions otherwise asked during a manual installation. The kickstart procedure is easily extended in the %post section. Everything after this magical keyword is considered a script and executed in the last stage of the installation process. In this script, you can take care of installing cronjobs, printers, update all sorts of config files. You can tell the installer to grab a kickstart file from a web server by adding ks=http://url/to/ks.cfg to the kernel boot parameters.
I was happy to see the kickstart feature introduced in Hoary (Ubuntu 5.04). Some of Red Hats’ kickstart features are still missing, but they might show up in Dapper, which is scheduled for April.
Secondly, two very cool features of the Live CD are the ability to make changes to the file system and the fact that it comes with a fully functional package management system: APT. After booting, you can simply open a terminal and apt-get install something. Even tried an apt-get update; apt-get upgrade, but be sure to do this just before a coffee break, even better… before lunch!
Ok, so why kickstarting a live cd? All installed packages and modified settings will be lost after rebooting anyway.
Quite some open source projects, like Typo3, Lamppix and schoolTool, are offering demo cd’s. These cd’s boot your pc into a fully configured web-server. If the Ubuntu Live CD would have a kickstart option, these projects could just as well offer a kickstart script for it. Instead of downloading a modified live cd distribution, just download the script that adds some functionality to the live cd you already have lying around.
I’ve once used a similar solution to turn a room of windows computers into a linux course lab. By then, the first ubuntu live cd was based on Morphix. Just two extra lines of code added some kind of kickstart option to the Morphix cd:
#!/bin/sh
# determine the mac address of the first network adapter
mac=`/sbin/ifconfig | awk '/HWaddr/ { print $5 }' | head -1`
# download and execute livecd init script
wget -q -O - http://intranet/livecd/init.sh.php?mac=$mac | /bin/sh
The init.sh.php script on the intranet server returned the code to execute at startup. By including the hosts’ mac address, the script is able to return host specific shell scripts. The lab pc’s where booting a script that took care of installing missing packages, mounting nfs home directories, mounting the nfs application directory, setting the root password, start ssh, etc. Think of it as a fat client alternative for LTSP.
If you have any ideas on how to get this into Ubuntu, go ahead!