smxi Makes Setting Up Debian a Breeze

in linux on 2014-05-11 14:50 (#3KB)

Typically, the install process doesn't stop with the installation of the base OS. You've still got to install and configure a lot of programs and drivers, for example: VirtualBox, Flash, LibreOffice, Java, and NVIDIA drivers, to name but a few. That takes time and energy.

Recently I needed a hard drive upgrade, and after trying out Xubuntu 14.04, I decided to stick with Crunchbang 11 . With a fresh installation, I needed to quickly get the applications that weren't an apt-get away. Enter smxi , a handy collection of scripts created to solve the frequent, repetitive support questions that often appear on IRC channels. Here's a guide showing how to set up smxi in Crunchbang.

How do you complete your config and install? What other tools and scripts are out there to ease the pain, particularly for multiple machines?

Re: Puppet (Score: 1)

by coolhand@pipedot.org on 2014-05-13 15:29 (#1JB)

Puppet isnt anywhere close to the same thing as smxi.. Puppet is for managing configurations of multiple systems, and keeping everything in line. Once you get more than a handful of systems, whether desktops or servers, the only way to effectively manage them is with tools, whether that be with Puppet, or something like active directory group policy in the MS world. So with Puppet or other configuration managers, you would create "recipes" that would define the configuration for a specific class of your machines. Then either push that configuration out to them, or have an agent on the remote machines that would poll your server to see if there are changes to apply.

SMXI is simply a script to manage things (installing kernels, specific software, upgrades, video drivers) on a single desktop.

They are NOT comparable at all..