Create a “Hands-Free” Linux Install Disk

Feb 26, 2008 by Roger Wheatley

While looking for a solution to another issue, I bumped into a site that enables us to create a hands-free install disk! Coolest feature? We can choose which distribution we’d like.

From their site:

“Why would I want to do that?

Let’s look at a few scenarios:

you are a sysadmin and you need to build twenty web servers, all almost exactly the same

you are working with other people who aren’t very familiar with Linux and you want them to be able to easily rebuild a special purpose machine if it fails, even if you are on holiday

you have many machines at remote sites which might fail. You want to leave a CD at each site that the local staff can boot from which will automatically rebuild the machine to a known state so that you can then remotely restore the backed-up data and get it running: all without having to travel half across the country to do it.”

We can choose from the following:

centOS
Debian
Fedora
OpenSUSE
Scientific
SuSe
Ubuntu

It’s a great (and welcomed) find! Take a look at the tool here: http://www.instalinux.com/