[Nottingham] Better than Windows? was: Response on awareness day

[Graeme Fowler]

On Thu, 2005-11-03 at 21:44 +0000, Andy Davidson wrote:
> We install Debian in about 4 minutes at work (standard minimal base 
> install), and Windows in about 15 - ah, Acronis is lovely.

Using PXE boot, a network install over a gigabit LAN and a pared-down
kickstart file I have an FC4 webserver install, including running mke2fs
to zap EXT3 partitions onto a pair of mirrored 80GB SATA drives down to
just over three minutes from power-on. OK, that's using IBM servers so
the internals are pretty zippy, but still.

Just to prove a point I did this with 16 servers simultaneously last
year (using FC1) and that pushed the build time out to 6m30s from me
powering on the first one to the last one completing. Lovely :)

CD-ROM installs are so last century, darling ;-)

Graeme