Automated Installation

there may be a few ways to do it.

If you are installing straight from apt, you could write a shell script to just run the required apt commands.

You could also write a set of shell scripts to pull the required files from the web and then run the configure and install scripts.

If you are only wanting this for linode, I believe at one point chris was looking in to been able to back images, so you could create the original image back it up and then install it on to new linodes etc.

Adam

I don't know much about kickstart and the FAI stuff, but, if your machines are truly identical, why one could burn a bootable image to CD-R.. At least get the basic system installed if space is an issue, and then perform apt-get commands to pull in the rest, as Adam suggested…

I've been working on a script to build the Linode host machines. These machines don't have CD-ROM drives, but it's easily fixed by temporarily hooking up the cd drive while performing the install.

Right now my process is: run through the installer (which I know you want to avoid), boot the new install, scp my script over, and it takes it from there.. Not really what you're looking for, but I'm working towards a common install image on CD, so I can avoid the installer…

Other options would include network boot, hard-drive to hard-drive install, removable Firewire/USB hard drives, and even the USB key-chain solid-state drives. I was even able to boot off the USB keychain to perform a BIOS upgrade (no floppies on these machines so the USB thing saved a lot of time).

Since you're just looking for this for setting up multiple Linodes (right?), you could rdiff-backup the two machines. You could boot the secondary machine off another disk image, copy or rdiff the entire distro from the other host to the blank/fresh disk image, and then create a profile to boot off the newly created filesystem…

-Chris