Introduction

How to read this manual

The aim of this manual is to document everything about the Working Centre Linux Project, so that if the project volunteers are eaten by locusts the project can continue. Eventually, we want this manual to contain enough information so that somebody could recreate the project from scratch if necessary.

Fortunately, you probably do not have to read this entire manual to use the project:

• If you are a user who has had our version of Linux installed onto your system, you should not need to read this manual at all. (You are welcome to read it, of course!)

• If you are a volunteer installing Linux onto refurbished systems, you should read Sections 3, 4 and 5 .

  Additionally, you may want to refer to the Appendices as weird installation situations crop up.

• If you are a developer or administrator, you should start by reading about the installation process in Sections 3, 4 and 5 .

  To learn about the installer itself, you should really read the FAI manual in addition to Section 6. You can find the FAI manual in the directory

  /usr/share/doc/fai/

  on the server.

This documentation is broken!

In the process of getting together a working installer, we have made many changes to the infrastructure in this project. We try to keep this documentation up to date, but errors slip through. Every so often you will probably read sections of this document that make no sense. In such cases, please let us know so that we can fix the errors and improve this document.

At the risk of creating yet another section that will quickly grow out of date, here is a list of the problems of which we are aware:

• Section 7, which covers the local Debian mirror on the server, needs to be rewritten:
  • We now use two mirrors on the server. One is an unstructured mirror as described in this section. Its location is

    /usr/local/mirror/localdebs/

    The other mirror is structured. It is created by some local scripts and the apt-move utility. The scripts can be found in

    /usr/local/mirror/bin/

    and the mirror is

    /usr/local/mirror/debian/

  • Because we now have a structured mirror, we no longer need a base_woody.tgz file.

• We patched the make-fai-bootfloppy utility to take an extra -i parameter. This changes the way that the utility is used to make floppies. See Section 9.6.1

• We took gnumeric out of the standard installation. It is usually installed (currently for any machine with a 1Gig or bigger hard drive), but not always. Thus, systems do not always contain a spreadsheet.

• The location of the FAI files on our server is

  /usr/local/share/fai/installer/

  and not

  /usr/local/share/fai/

  However, if you downloaded our software, you will find the files in

  /usr/local/share/wclp-version/installer/

  where version is the version of WCLP you downloaded.

• We now use GRUB as the default bootloader instead of LILO. Boot floppies still use LILO, but we install GRUB to the hard drive, because dual-booting under GRUB is easy.

• We no longer use pdq as our printing system. Currently we use lprng instead, but even that has a few problems. Eventually we may switch to the CUPS printing system.

Conventions and Terminology

In this section we discuss some terms you should be familiar with. We also outline the conventions we use in the manual.

Terminology

Here are some terms you will want to know:

client:

A client machine is a machine onto which we will install Linux.

FAI:

FAI stands for “Fully Automated Install.” It is the program that we use to install Linux onto computers.

NFS:

NFS stands for “Network Filesystem”. It is a networking protocol that allows computers to use files and directories on remote computers. To access the remote drive, the computer mounts the drive using NFS.

FAI relies on NFS to mount a temporary Linux filesystem, which it uses to install a copy of Linux on the client machine.

server:

Our server machine is a Linux server that contains the local package archive and the FAI program files. Client machines connect to the server in order to get Linux installed on them.

(More terms? -P.)

Conventions

To disambiguate filenames, when ending a sentence with a file we always put a space between the period and the filename. For example, I will end this sentence by mentioning the file foo .

We use a number of different typefaces to indicate special terms and instructions:

• We indicate files or directories as follows: /usr/local/share/fai/

• We indicate text you should type into the computer as follows: type this exactly

• We indicate messages that the computer prints out as follows: Hello world

• We indicate program names as follows: aptitude

• We indicate menu items as follows: File . To indicate a sequence of menus you should follow, we use $\to$: File $\to$ Save As

• We indicate keys to press as follows: $\langle\textnormal{enter}\rangle$