I'm very happy to announce, that FAI (Fully automatic Installation) now can install and configure CentOS and Scientific Linux Cern (SLC). You can use a Debian FAI server for installing CentOS version 5 and 6 or SLC 5 and 6.

As an example I've also built a FAI multi-distribution CD which installs those three different Linux distributions with different configurations. Get this ISO image from

http://fai-project.org/fai-cd/

This installation is very quick. I've done a CentOS 6.0 installation (with graphical desktop) in 199 seconds (in a kvm instance on a quad-core 3.2GHz, hard disk in RAM) and it only needs 490 seconds on the real hardware when installing from CD.

A short description how to install CentOS or SLC via network from your FAI server is described in this mail: https://lists.uni-koeln.de/pipermail/linux-fai/2011-September/009243.html

Feedback is always welcome. Please send your feedback to the linux-fai mailing list https://lists.uni-koeln.de/mailman/listinfo/linux-fai/

Best regards, Thomas, in behalf of the FAI team

About FAI:

FAI is a non-interactive system to install, customize and manage Linux systems and software configurations on computers as well as virtual machines and chroot environments, from small networks to large infrastructures and clusters.

Compared to kickstart, FAI is more flexible and includes a powerfull class mechanism to build a configuration from multiple building blocks. It also includes the features of cobbler.

The project was started in 1999 for the Debian distribution. Later Ubuntu support was added and some time ago we start adding RPM support.