Anaconda (installer)
Anaconda is a free installer for easy installation of a Linux operating system. It is mainly by employees of the company Red Hat developed.
Anacondas are lizard -eating snakes - like pythons - and the installation software of the Linux distribution Caldera OpenLinux was called " Lizard " ( German: " lizard " ), hence the name.
Functionality
The installation is running either wizard - guided with graphical (GUI) or character-based user interface ( TUI) or automatically by means of a so-called " Kickstart " configuration file, which in a corporate environment is useful for example when multiple installation. The kickstart file can also be generated dynamically adapted to the target system.
It should be easily portable and supports a wide range of hardware platforms (IA -32, Itanium, Alpha, IBM System/390, PowerPC ). It supports the installation of local storage devices such as CD -ROM drives and hard drives as well as network resources via FTP, HTTP or NFS. The new system can be installed alongside existing Windows or Mac OS X systems on the same physical disk. For this, the system will boot from (Intel ) Macintosh systems (EFI ) and the decrease of existing (system) partitions ( including those with the Windows file system NTFS) support.
Technology
It is primarily in Python, written some modules in C. It has a designed with Glade graphical front-end based on PyGTK and a text frontend based TUI library Newt.
Availability and use
It is distributed as free software in source code under the terms of the GNU General Public License ( GPL).
Originally developed for the operating system family of the company Red Hat (RHEL, Fedora ), Anaconda is out at this now ported in a number of other operating systems in use and was for Debian systems.
History
Anaconda is being developed since 1999 and was on 6 September 1999 for the first time in a beta version of Red Hat Linux 6.1 included, which was released on October 4, 1999. Until Fedora 9 Anaconda used a separate backend for hardware detection called " kudzu ".