Selling systems with Fedora preloaded.

[Gain Paolo Mureddu]

Jesse Keating wrote:

>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!
>
>  
>
This brings a question... If (for instance) avoiding the run of first 
boot (from a chrooted sysrescue session) the system is put up2date on a 
default install, would taht be considered modification? Most probably it 
would... I thought of the first boot post-install method as it seems to 
be the intended way for Fedora, only what would be the best way to 
ensable a disk to work in this way?