Linux@DUKE Core 6
We've taken Fedora Core 6 and Fedora Extras 6 tree and added a series of packages to help deploy commonly used services and keep them securely updated. We used the Fedora distribution because it offers the latest versions of many commonly used desktop applications and development environments. For those of you interested in the nicest looking and interacting Desktop linux experience or the most recent versions of libraries and programming languages available then the Fedora Core 6-based distribution may be well suited to your needs.
The life cycle of the Fedora Distributions is very short. In general, only 13 months, however, upgrading from release to release is pretty simple so you should be able to keep your system running without a lot of pain.
Architectures
i386
x86_64
Installing
Linux@DUKE is built with network installs in mind, so we do not provide ISO images for CD-ROM installations. There are several ways you can install over the network -- an automated way for large clusters, and manually for personal machines.
Manual Install
You may use "boot.iso" to create a bootable installation CD, containing all necessary drivers. It can be used to start a network-based installation on both laptops and desktops. Please refer to your OS's documentation if you need help burning the .iso image to a CD.
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boot.iso(i386)Servers and paths
Boot the installation media you have created. When it gets to the network-install section select HTTP and provide the following two entries (depending on the architecture):
Server: install.linux.duke.edu
Path(i386): /pub/linux/base/fc-6/i386
Path(x86_64): /pub/linux/base/fc-6/x86_64
Automated Install
For an automated install you will need at least the following two things:
PXE Server
Kickstart File
Installing and Configuring a PXE Server
"PXE" stands for "Preboot Execution Environment" and allows you to load a bootable image for your machine from the network. In order to do that, however, your network card needs to support the "LAN Boot" option and have a recent version of PXE installed in its ROM. Chris Geddings has written a brief guide describing how you can install and configure a PXE Server to use with automated installations:
Creating a Kickstart File
Kickstart is a technology created and used by Red Hat to automate machine installations. This is a topic too lengthy to go into detail here, but you can read up on kickstarts on redhat.com website: