This is the subject of an interesting thread on the debian-devel mailing list.
It started with ".. The current policy of hiding other versions of Debian is limiting the adoption of your OS by people like me.."
It seems that this user managed to contact us developers and give us some important information how we can improve the user experience. The following discussion shows that all our users need non-free firmware to get their wireless network cards run.
Do we provide such installation images for our users?
Sure. We build them regularly, host them on our servers, we also sign the hash sum with our official signing key. But we hide them very well and still call them unofficial. Why? I would like to have a more positive name for those images. Ubuntu has the HWE (Hardware Enablement) kernel. Maybe Debian firmware enablement images?
We should better promote the images that fits best for our users.
BTW, the URL for all these useful images is https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/images-including-firmware/
Since I'm not using the Debian installer or live image often, I thought my own installation tool would already do better. In FAI , I install the package firmware-linux-nonfree if I need some nonfree firmware. But it appears that this package does not depend on any WiFi firmware package. Oops. So, I've filed a bug report #980758 and propose to add another meta package that depends on a list of firmware packages for WiFi cards.
I've now added a workaround to the FAIme service. You can now generate fully automated customized installation images including nonfree firmware for the stable and testing release. The stable release images can also use a newer kernel and firmware from backports. All other package are still from stable. Another useful image variant in my opinion.
The new FAI version 5.9.4 adds support for the new Ubuntu LTS version 20.04 (focal). New FAI installation images (including a Ubuntu only ISO) are available from
https://fai-project.org/fai-cd
I've added support for the Debian testing release (currently bullseye) to the FAIme service for building customized installation and cloud images. This service still supports the oldstable and stable release including variants with a backports kernel.
The FAI.me build service is also using the newest FAI version and the customized ISO images can be booted in an UEFI or legacy BIOS environment.
20 years ago, on December 20, 1999 FAI 1.0 was released. Many things have happened since then. Some milestones:
- 1999: version 1.0
- 2000: first official Debian package
- 2001: first detailed user report ("No complete installs. Teething problems.")
- 2005: Wiki page and IRC
- 2005: FAI CD
- 2006: fai dirinstall
- 2007: new partitioning tool setup-storage
- 2009: new web design
- 2014: brtfs support
- 2016: autodiscover function, profiles menu
- 2016: fai-diskimage, cloud images
- 2017: cross architecture builds
- 2017: Fai.me web service
- 2020: UEFI support
Besides that, a lot of other things happened in the FAI project. Apart from the first report, we got more than 300 detailed reports containing positive feedback. We had several FAI developers meetings and I did more than 40 talks about FAI all over the world. We had a discussion about an alleged GPL violation of FAI in the past, I did several attempts to get a logo for FAI, but we still do not have one. We moved from subversion to git, which was very demanding for me. The FAI.me service for customized installation and cloud images was used more than 5000 times. The Debian Cloud team now uses FAI to build the official Debian cloud images.
I'm very happy with the outcome of this project and I like to thank all people who contributed to FAI in the past 20 years!
This week, I've released the new FAI version 5.9. It supports UEFI boot from CD/DVD and USB stick. Also two new tools were added:
- fai-sed - call sed on a file but check for changes before writing
- fai-link - create symlink idempotent
UEFI support in fai-cd only used grub, no syslinux or isolinux is needed. New FAI installation images are also available from
https://fai-project.org/fai-cd
The FAI.me build service is also using the newest FAI version and the customized ISO images can now be booted in an UEFI environment.
The FAI.me service for creating customized installation and cloud images now supports additional kernel cmdline parameters. After toggling to the advanced settings, you can add your options. These will replace the default grub "quiet" option.
This feature is currently only available for the installation images, but not for the cloud images.
The URL of the FAI.me service is
The Fully Automatic Installation (FAI) is using a read-only nfsroot since it's very beginning. This is also used in diskless clients enviroments and in the LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Project).
During a network installation the clients are running as diskless clients, so the installation has full access to the local hard disk which is not in use. But we need some files to be writable on the read-only nfsroot. In the past we've created symlinks to a ram disk. Later we used aufs (another union fs), a kernel module for doing union mounts of several file systems. Putting a ram disk on top of the read-only nfsroot with aufs makes the nfsroot writable. But aufs was not available in kernel 4.X any more. It was replaced by overlayfs.
The initrd of FAI mounts the nfsroot read only and then puts a tmpfs ram disk on top of it using overlayfs. The result is a new merged file system which is writable. This works nicely since several years when using NFSv3. But when using NFSv4 we can read from a file, but writing always reported
openat(AT_FDCWD,....) = -1 EOPNOTSUPP (Operation not supported)
After some days of debugging overlayfs and NFS v4, I found that it's a complicated mixture of NFS and acl support (POSIX and nfs4 acl) and what overlayfs expects from the file systems in respect to certain xattr. Overlayfs uses calls like
setxattr(work/work, "trusted.overlay.opaque", "0", 1, 0x0) = 0
and writing to a file used
getxattr("/b/lower/etc/test1", "system.nfs4_acl", ....) = 80
without any errors. When talking to some overlayfs guys they ask me to disable acl for the exported NFS file system. There's an noacl option listed on nfs(5), but it's for NFS version 2 and 3 only, not for NFS v4. You cannot disable ACL on a NFS v4 mount.
In the end the solution was to disable ACL on the whole file system on the NFS server, which is exported to the clients. If you have a ext4 file system this works on the NFS server by doing
# mount -oremount,noacl $EXPORTED_FS
After that, overlayfs will detect that ACL's are not support on the NFS mount and behaves as expected allowing writes to a file.
You will need to use dracut instead of initramfs-tools for creating the initrd. The later is using busybox or klibc tools inside the initrd. Both do not support NFS v4 mounts (https://bugs.debian.org/409271).
Dracut is using the normal libc based executables. The Debian package
of dracut supports the kernel cmdline option rootovl. This is an
example of the kernel cmdline options:
rootovl ip=dhcp root=11.22.33.44:/srv/fai/nfsroot
This mounts a read only nfsroot and puts a tmpfs on top for making it writable.
The new FAI release 5.8.7 now supports apt keys in files called package_config/CLASS.gpg. Before we only supported .asc files. fai-mirror has a new option -V, which checks if variables are used in package_config/ and uses variable definitions from class/.var.
I've also created new ISO images, which now install Debian 10 by default. They are available from
https://fai-project.org/fai-cd
If you need a newer kernel, checkout the FAI.me service which can also build ISO images using the kernel from backports which currently is 5.2.
The FAI.me service for creating customized installation and cloud images now supports a backports kernel for stable release Debian 10 (aka buster). If you enable the backports option, you will currently get kernel 5.2. This will help you if you have newer hardware that is not support by the default kernel 4.19. The backports option is also still available for the images when using the old Debian 9 (stretch) release.
The URL of the FAI.me service is
FAI.me, the build service for installation and cloud images has a new feature. When building an installation images, you can enable automatic reboot or shutdown at the end of the installation in the advanced options. This was implemented due to request by users, that are using the service for their VM instances or computers without any keyboard connected.
In April I gave a talk about FAI a the GUUG-Frühjahrsfachgespräch in Karlsruhe (Slides). At this nice meeting Ingo from RadioTux made an interview with me (https://www.radiotux.de/index.php?/archives/8050-RadioTux-Sendung-April-2019.html) (from 0:35:30).
Then I found an article in the iX Special 2019 magazine about automation in the data center which mentioned FAI. Nice. But I was very supprised and happy when I saw a whole article about FAI in the Linux Magazin 7/2019. A very good article with a some focus on network things, but also the class system and installing other distributions is described. And they will also publish another article about the FAI.me service in a few months. I'm excited!
In a few days, I going to DebConf19 in Curitiba for two weeks. I will work on Debian web stuff, check my other packages (rinse, dracut, tcsh) and hope to meet a lot of friendly people.
And in August I'm giving a talk at FrOSCon about FAI.
I've installed a desktop with buster to see if my FAI configuration was working. When I opened a xterm window I say that the font I use looks different than on stretch. It looks not that clean and a little more bold.
I've checked if the correct fonts were used using "xterm -report-fonts" which correctly showed
xos4-terminus-medium-r-normal--16-----*-iso10646-1
I'm setting this in my ~/.Xdefaults
Xft.hintstyle: hintfull
but on Buster the hintstyle (reported by xterm -report-fonts) was now 1 instead of 3. I found out that the package fontconfig-config has a now a new debconf question:
fontconfig-config fontconfig/hinting_style
I've set this to hintfull, but still no change. Then I found a very detailed description on FreeType Subpixel Hinting and Debian bug #867657.
The solution was to also set the variable
export FREETYPE_PROPERTIES=truetype:interpreter-version=35
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