The minimum profile

"All The Small Things" - Blink 182

On SLES9 the smallest AutoYaST profile had to contain a partitioning and a software section (well, and a user section with a root user if you wanted to login). On SLES10 the software section was no longer required because AutoYaST has chosen a very small system to install (only the base pattern) if no software section was there.
Now, on openSUSE 11.1/SLES11 not even the partitioning section is required anymore. If you don't provide the partitioning information, AutoYaST will ask the storage code of YaST2 what it would suggest in a manual installation to the user and that suggestion is used by AutoYaST too then. Those suggestions are often quite conservative and YaST tries to keep other Linux/Windows partitions intact.

So on openSUSE 11.1 / SLES11 the smallest profile looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE profile>
<profile xmlns="http://www.suse.com/1.0/yast2ns" xmlns:config="http://www.suse.com/1.0/configns">
    <users config:type="list">
        <user>
            <encrypted config:type="boolean">false</encrypted>
            <user_password>myrootpassword</user_password>
            <username>root</username>
        </user>
    </users>
</profile>

well, actually it looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE profile>
<profile xmlns="http://www.suse.com/1.0/yast2ns" xmlns:config="http://www.suse.com/1.0/configns">
</profile>

but you can not login then.

You might say, "that's nice but where is the sense in a totally unconfigured system?" and you are right. There is not so much use in it. All I wanted to show with this article is, that you can try out AutoYaST without configuring a full blown XML file. Now you can start to fill that XML file with flesh step by step, section by section. Put it on an USB stick for example and add autoyast=usb:///my.xml to the boot menu of an openSUSE 11.1/SLES11 DVD and that's it. You just fired up an autoinstallation.

bye bye, Uwe

P.S.: don't forget to buy the latest Diary of Dreams album that is released today ;)