Selling systems with Fedora preloaded.

Jesse Keating jkeating at j2solutions.net
Mon Nov 28 16:06:02 UTC 2005


On Mon, 2005-11-28 at 01:50 -0500, Gain Paolo Mureddu wrote:
> 
> Thanks a lot, Rahul. I'll certainly take a look at it! Certainly 
> Kickstart would be the way to go, plus taking advantage of the 
> capability of Anaconda to install extra disks from the first boot 
> interface. Whether the user decides or not to use the "extras" disk, 
> would be up to him/her, and as such the Fedora intallation would be 
> safeguarded that way, because up until that point, the installation will 
> be a pristine Fedora default.

You should also take a look at what current vendors are doing.  Pogo
Linux and Penguin Computing both sell systems pre-installed with Fedora.
If I remember correctly (and I used to work for Pogo) both do modify the
final install before it goes out the door.  However I don't think any
legal action has been taken against them as it isn't really done in a
damaging to Fedora kind of way.  That said, it isn't exactly legal, and
I didn't like doing it.

What I wanted to do while at Pogo Linux, was to ship a system with Just
Fedora and all updates installed, but with a Post-Install CD that users
would run.  This CD would "fix" a few things, install some custom and
3rd party packages, perhaps change some graphics defaults and stuff like
that.  Thus we are SHIPPING an unmodified Fedora, and the end user is
given the choice to modify it or keep it stock.  What we did instead was
to pre-install all that stuff before it went out the door.  I still
developed a post-install CD set, one that also included all the updates
at spin time.  The buyer could do a Fedora re-install for whatever
reason (happens a lot, they want their own partitioning scheme / package
set) then user our Post-Install CD to do the updates and last mile
customization.

I am not sure of the process that Penguin uses.

Hope this helps!

-- 
Jesse Keating RHCE      (geek.j2solutions.net)
Fedora Legacy Team      (www.fedoralegacy.org)
GPG Public Key          (geek.j2solutions.net/jkeating.j2solutions.pub)
 
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