Comment Ooops, stupid me. Formatting fixed. Kickstarts,etc (Score 1) 205
It just so happens that Once Upon A Time, I worked for a major OEM of PC's that sold Red Hat on it's boxes, in the custom configuration department (yeah, it's not hard to guess which one, think Big, Blue, and Not IBM. I got your "E" right here) I have a few points, some of which have already been made.
#1 Kickstarts do work, and work very well. mkkickstart was/is broken on 6.1, and it's not really too hard to fix. Kickstarts allow you to do some pretty serious magic on the installation however, and with bootp, nfs and some development time, you could install custom built machines with individual network settings ,etc... all from the get-go.With kickstart, I made systems build in the factory, on customer's sites, and so forth, so there's no reason that you can't get away with it in your situation. There are some tricks to getting kickstart to go, but you can email me if you want more info. Ghosting is fine, but you'll need a workaround if you intend to use lilo in the MBR, as ghost will break on that. Other imaging products also break lilo, so I'd recomment either sticking with a dos mbr and putting lilo in the first primary active partition, or doing that first, and have it fix it self on first boot.
#2 Debian. Red Hat kickstarts (and mandrake, of course) are very nice and all, but apt beats the hell out of RPM, even auto-rpm. I'd recommend debian if you can get by without the gee-whizzery of Red Hat, as it's stable, and mass upgrades via cron would be simple (relatively) to implement. This could save you a great deal of pain.
#3 Network Filesystems. Stay the hell away from NFS and especially (ESPECIALLY!!!) automounters of any sort. They suck. I agree with another poster to an extent, but modern package management lets you get away with having a lot more stuff local. Still, for home directories, shared storage, and other needs, I'd recommend you go with Coda, AFS, or even use samba. For printing, CUPS is great.
#4 Wordperfect 8 works well. The new trash corel has spawned (wordperfect 9, etc) work poorly and would require more than the 64mb max memory you are looking to do. For these reasons, applix seems a better choice, or even Staroffice (no experience, I'm theorizing). There are a lot of parts that can make your unix network put the smack down on the windows world now too. LDAP, CUPS, Kerberos, do-dads like HP OpenMail, etc...can give you all the functionality that you could ever need.
That's all folks!
#1 Kickstarts do work, and work very well. mkkickstart was/is broken on 6.1, and it's not really too hard to fix. Kickstarts allow you to do some pretty serious magic on the installation however, and with bootp, nfs and some development time, you could install custom built machines with individual network settings
#2 Debian. Red Hat kickstarts (and mandrake, of course) are very nice and all, but apt beats the hell out of RPM, even auto-rpm. I'd recommend debian if you can get by without the gee-whizzery of Red Hat, as it's stable, and mass upgrades via cron would be simple (relatively) to implement. This could save you a great deal of pain.
#3 Network Filesystems. Stay the hell away from NFS and especially (ESPECIALLY!!!) automounters of any sort. They suck. I agree with another poster to an extent, but modern package management lets you get away with having a lot more stuff local. Still, for home directories, shared storage, and other needs, I'd recommend you go with Coda, AFS, or even use samba. For printing, CUPS is great.
#4 Wordperfect 8 works well. The new trash corel has spawned (wordperfect 9, etc) work poorly and would require more than the 64mb max memory you are looking to do. For these reasons, applix seems a better choice, or even Staroffice (no experience, I'm theorizing). There are a lot of parts that can make your unix network put the smack down on the windows world now too. LDAP, CUPS, Kerberos, do-dads like HP OpenMail, etc...can give you all the functionality that you could ever need.
That's all folks!
