This Week in Anaconda #3

Quick bug fix round up

Nothing too exciting happened this week in anaconda land so I'm going to recap a couple commits and then get to something completely different. dlehman committed all his action sorting patches I discussed last week and we will shortly have a build including them. akozumpl got us away from the nasty old pile of timezone setting code and closer to what's in system-config-date. Now that we're running in full screen, we have space for stuff like that. We also had a bunch of build fixes and logging changes.

wiki

I thought I'd spend a minute talking about the anaconda wiki, which is surprisingly useful and reasonably up-to-date. In particular, there are three pages that you may find the most helpful:

• Building - This page describes how you do a source build of anaconda, how you build an anaconda package (including the directions for what we do when making official builds), and how to create a new tree to test out your modifications. Because anaconda is a special program, building and testing it is never really straightforward. Our wiki page attempts to at least explain all the steps though it's still a little intimidating.


• Kickstart - Kickstart is the anaconda automation language. You write up a text file detailing all the installation parameters, then point the installer at that file (commonly by putting it on a web site and passing anaconda ks=http://whatever), and anaconda runs without further interaction. This wiki page describes the kickstart file syntax and all the various commands and options you can use. We frequently update kickstart commands so the wiki page describes the absolute latest version. For information on a specific Fedora release, you'll need to consult the installation guide.


• Options - You can pass a ton of command line options to anaconda via the bootloader prompt. They look like kernel command line options because of that, but they end up getting passed to anaconda. With them, you can control network parameters, where to install from, debugging levels, what hardware to probe, and much more. Like the Kickstart page, we attempt to keep this one reasonably up to date.