image installation with openSUSE 11.1

With openSUSE 11.1 (not SLES11) you can use pre configured images for the software installation with AutoYaST. It's just a simple boolean that indicates to use or don't use images:

  <deploy_image>
      <image_installation config:type="boolean">true</image_installation>
  </deploy_image>

Those images are in the "/images" directory on the installation media.
YaST will calculate on it's own which images to use to fulfill the requirements in your <software> section. At the end, a system which was installed via RPMs only and a system that was installed by using images + some RPMS will look exactly the same.
I did a test with the following in my autoyast profile:

  <deploy_image>
      <image_installation config:type="boolean">false</image_installation>
  </deploy_image>
  <software>
    <patterns config:type="list">
       <pattern>base</pattern>
       <pattern>enhanced_base</pattern>
       <pattern>sw_management</pattern>
       <pattern>games</pattern>
       <pattern>imaging</pattern>
       <pattern>kde4</pattern>
       <pattern>kde4_basis</pattern>
       <pattern>multimedia</pattern>
       <pattern>x11</pattern>
       <pattern>xgl</pattern>
    </patterns>
  </software>

the installation took about 25 minutes via network and 738 RPMs were installed - no images of course because the boolean was set to "false". The system was about 1,9GB in size.
Then I changed image_installation to "true" and did the installation again. This time it took about 13 minutes and besides the images, 114 additional RPMs (638MB) were installed. Those RPMs were not covered by the images and so they needed to be installed as RPM.

Take a look at image installation on your own with openSUSE beta5. Maybe you can speed up your autoinstallations.

Autoyast-ing at home by Bubli

Bubli did a really nice article about using AutoYaST in a running system. To be honest, I always wanted to write such an articel too but was way too lazy busy in the last few weeks :)

initrd broken on openSUSE 11.1 beta1

openSUSE beta1 has a broken initrd. A signing key is missing.
I have uploaded fixed initrd files for openSUSE beta1 for i586 and x86_64 to the download section of my busines homepage.
Thanx for testing AutoYaST on openSUSE.

remote files during autoinstallation

With AutoYaST you could always store complete files in the XML profile to save them somewhere into the installed system later. With openSUSE 11.1 and SLES11 you can specify the location of those file to a remote source like an HTTP server for example, so there is no need to store the files directly in the XML profile anymore.

  <files config:type="list">
    <file>
      <file_path>/bla</file_path>
      <file_location>http://10.10.0.162/file_test.txt</file_location>
    </file>
  </files>

The section is evaluated after the network configuration is done so start_immediately should be set to true for the needed network interface, which is the default anyway if it's not specified. Protocols are the same like for the AutoYaST profile (http(s), ftp, nfs, tftp, ...)
Here you can read more about the files section in AutoYaST.

post-patterns in AutoYaST

with openSUSE 11.1 and SLES 11 you can install patterns in stage 2 and not only in stage 1. For packages that was already possible since quite a while via
<post-packages config:type="list">
and now this configuration option got a sibling called ... surprise surprise ...
<post-patterns config:type="list">
here is the documentation.

YaUIc in AutoYaST 11.1/SLES11

"Yet another UI change" in the AutoYaST UI. After using the last UI change for a few hours, we came to the conclusion that there is some room for improvement and so we did a redesign again and now it looks a bit like the Mac OS Finder tableview which is another step forward for the usability of the AutoYaST UI.
I'm quite confident that we'll keep it that way this time ;-)

some AutoYaST UI changes

in openSUSE 11.1 and SLES11, there are some changes in the AutoYaST UI. First of all, the tree on the left was dropped to be more YaST control center like and all summaries of one section are collected on one page now. That means you save at least one click when jumping between modules ;)
The usage of the UI has changed a bit by this, like some buttons were replaced by Combobox Widgets.
Thanx to Martin Schmidkunz for the suggestion on how the UI should look like from a usability point of view and thanx to Sven Schober (a student in my team) for implementing it.



Another important change has happened in the validation dialog which shows the name of the section in the AutoYaST profile that has failed the validation now.
With jing installed you were always able to see which part of the profile is broken but now even with only xmllint installed you can at least see wich section failed.
Thanx to Sven Schober again for implementing this.