Hi all.
I've heard (and experienced) that the ability to select individual packages during installation has been removed from Fedora Core 1. Before you go crazy, I'm NOT talking about hitting the 'details' button for each group and selecting from the packages listed. Even if you pick *all* of these packages, it doesn't amount to *all* of the available packages that come with the distribution. The only way to do that is to choose an 'everything' install, which even warns you that your install will be considerably larger than just selecting all of the packages listed in the 'details' for each group.
As an administrator, I have to install many Linux boxes. Historically, I have used kickstart for this, and the easiest way to create a kickstart template is to go through *one* really long, arduous install, and then use the resulting .ks file in root's home directory as a starting point. Generally, the problem with creating a good kickstart file in my environment isn't really adding packages, per se (though I do some of that), but *removing* packages I don't want, that are part of the default installation. Not having this feature at install time in FC1 means that my .ks file upon first boot is absolutely useless to me. It still baffles my mind why the team would go out of its way to *remove* this functionality - though admittedly, I don't spend a lot of time trolling the dev list. I've seen references online to the fact that this subject has been covered a million times - but I don't see actual links. If anyone has links that explain the reasoning, let me in on that!
Regardless - links or no links - what I'm left with now is a situation where I have about 30 machines to install, and I'm now going to use 'ghost' to install them. The biggest value add to using redhat over other distributions in the past was the ability to kickstart machines. If I'm just going to ghost them anyway, that value add is gone completely, so I might just as well use gentoo ;-)
My real question is simply 'is this feature coming back, and if so, when?'.
thanks
