From FAIWiki

Apart from FAI, which is for sure the best automatic installation solution, I regularly run into announcements and articles about other installation/deployment tools for various distributions and combinations of them. I'll list them here, and add info and reviews as they come:

It might be interesting, to create some comparison table and set some criteria by which we can compare these all to FAI.

Installation tools

• Are the 64studio custom distribution service anything like FAI? http://64studio.com/press_release_ubuntu
• kadeploy: http://kadeploy.imag.fr/index.html
• cobbler/koan: http://cobbler.et.redhat.com/
• google slack:
  • http://www.stillhq.com/presentations/australia_sydney_slug2006jan_slack.pdf
  • http://www.sundell.net/~alan/projects/slack/
  • http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;1814790366;fp;16;fpid;0
  • http://groups.google.com/group/slack-users

• hp has something, too("one installer for many distributions":
  • http://www.heise.de/newsticker/result.xhtml?url=/newsticker/meldung/91476&words=HP&T=hp%20
  • http://linuxcoe.sourceforge.net/
• on the windows side Unattended: http://unattended.sourceforge.net/
  • it is defintely possible to create unattended install files based on classes with FAI!
• a alternate windows tool: http://www.uib.de/www/home/opsi/index.html

Configurations management tools

• Puppet: http://reductivelabs.com/trac/puppet
• Automateit: http://automateit.org/
• bcfg2: http://trac.mcs.anl.gov/projects/bcfg2
• Windows pakcge managgement (maybe we can use wpkg to enable softupdates on windows): http://wpkg.org/