Overview

In an ideal world, JACAL would be a single Linux bootdisk that you put in the target machine and reboot it. Then all the information is pulled down from the network and the Linux scripts partition the HD and configure and install all the OS's on the target computer. This is not an ideal world and there are two things keeping JACAL from fully setting up Windows NT all by itself. First, NTFS write capability is not yet mature or safe under Linux.

In addition, NT does a lot of undocumented magic when it is installed. The process that NT uses to perform it's initial installation is not well enough documented to be able to modify a base install image of NT so that it is fully localized to the hardware of the machine.

There are three main steps to getting JACAL up and running on your system. First you have to setup the main JACAL components. This includes the information to create a bootdisk that starts the whole process on the target machine. It is also where the initial information is located that is copied to the target machine's hard drive to start the process. Mostly this just involves getting the information to the right place and then customizing it to your environment.

The next part is the jacal samba based portion which is the information used once the install process has moved into the NT unattended setup phase. This includes tools to install and manipulate application images. You will probably also want to create application images to install. These are part of this step.

Finally, you will have to configure and/or add services to your network that JACAL uses for the whole process.