In order to verify if the installation instructions in the Gentoo Handbook are still valid, and to allow me to quickly seed new Gentoo installations in a virtual environment, I wrote a very ugly (really) script to automatically “stage” a Gentoo Linux installation in a KVM guest. This is not my intention to make this an “unattended” installation script, it is merely one of the many scripts out there to help some poor developer in working a bit more agile.
I decided to document gensetup as a first step (cfr my earlier Catching up post) in my quest to document how to setup a virtual Gentoo Hardened (with SELinux) virtual architecture. The gensetup tool is just to provide a (semi)automated way to install Gentoo according to the instructions in the Gentoo Handbook. Later, I’ll add documentation for the setup_*.sh scripts that I use to upgrade such a base installation to a specific server/service.
You want a probably better working installation script, check out Andrew Gaffney’s Quickstart for Gentoo. And if you know of other such scripts, I would be glad to hear from them, if not just to keep track of the various similar projects out there.
Edit: The quickstart application does not seem to be maintained anymore. My bad. However, suggestions are made in the comments for more up-to-date systems ;-)
Hi Sven,
There is a fork of Andrew’s work:
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-757097-start-0.html
https://github.com/r1k0/kicktoo
I made a ~40kb patch for the latest Kicktoo version a few months ago, which still needs to be merged. We use the script in production to deploy minimal hardened gentoo systems, it’s not perfect (yet), but it works fairly well.
Please feel free to mail me for the patch if interested!
Hi ikkhares,
Nice to know of the Kicktoo project, didn’t hear of it earlier. Personally, I do not think it will be a good substitute for my script as I use the script to validate the installation instructions as well. However, when I would need to quickly stage Gentoo systems (without needing to validate installation instructions) it would now be on my list to check out ;-)
I would not recommend the unmaintained Quickstart to anyone. I don’t think it has been worked on since I’ve been a Gentoo Developer, 3+ years.
Made an ebuild for kicktoo in the LTSP overlay.
I put the old GLIS scripts (http://glis.sourceforge.net/) on github (https://github.com/letharion/G.L.I.S-Gentoo-Linux-Install-Script) a while ago. I’ve made some minor improvements, and used them a couple of times, but I don’t spin up very many systems. All the parts related to partitioning and formatting seems to have broken long ago when parted altered it’s output, but otherwise it works rather well.
Hi Sven,
There is a lack of quickinstall scripts, nice to see that. But:
http://dev.gentoo.org/~swift/docs/gensetup-guide.xml has a problem. I’m getting internal server error. :)
Thanks, i’ll ask the infrastructure teams to take a look at that, seems to be with all GuideXML documents on dev.gentoo.org for now.