Thomas Lange

FAI.me - A Build Service for Installation and Cloud Images

FAI.me is a web-based build service for creating customized installation or cloud images for Debian.

It’s using the FAI software, so the installation will run unattended without any interaction necessary. The cloud images are ready to boot in a VM.

On the website, you can customize different properties of your image, like the disk image size and the disk format, the language, a user name and password.

You can select a Debian distribution, a desktop and enable backports just by one click. It’s possible to add your public key for access to the root account. This can also be done by just specifying your GitHub account. You can add your own list of packages that will be included into the image. After a few minutes the your disk images is created and you will get a download link, including a log the the creation process and a link to the FAI configuration that was used to create your customized image.

The talk will demonstrate the build service and explains how the jobs are processed in the background using the FAI tools. The configuration, that is used will also be presented.

https://fai-project.org/FAIme

Talk slides available at https://fai-project.org/doc/fai.me-build-service-dc18.pdf

Making Debian more user friendly by changing the web start page (www.debian.org)

The talk[1] from Keith Edmunds gave me some inspiration, why Debian needs to change its home page. I like to share my thoughts about improvements of the Debian home page without changing the design in the first step. I started by cleaning up the content and removed a lot of links.

I will show a prototype and explain what I’ve changed and why.

[1] https://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2017/mini-debconf-cambridge/building-a-05m-business-on-debian.vp9.webm (from 0:36:30)

The audience are people working on the web page and designers who could do this much better than I can do.