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1 Introduction

2 Configuration management

3 Package management

4 References

Introduction

This article will look at the configuration system available for various FSDG compliant distributions.

Configuration management

Configuration system	Distribution	Works	Skills	Can configure the local system	Can configure remote systems	Can install the distribution	Can create images	Features
Consfigurator	Guix	Not packaged
	Hyperbola	Not packaged
	Parabola	Not packaged
	PureOS 10 (byzantium)	Not packaged
	Trisquel 11 (aramo)	Partial^[1]	Require to know lisp	Yes^[2]	Yes^[3]	No	Yes^[4]	Can configure the whole system
Cockpit	Parabola	Yes	Interfaces: Web: Very easy to use Command line interface through the web interface	Yes	Yes^[5]	No	No	Can manage storage devices including LVM volumes Can configure network Can manage virtual machines (libvirt) and containers (podman) Can manage user accounts Can keep the system up to date Many plugins available but very few are packaged^[6]. Also has a builtin terminal for the rest.
	PureOS Byzantium	Yes^[7]		Yes	Yes^[5]	No	No
	Trisquel 11	Yes^[8]		Yes	Yes^[5]	No	No
Debian installer preseed	PureOS 10 (byzantium)	No^[9]		No	No	Yes	No	Can configure the whole system^[10]
	Trisquel 10	No^[11]
	Trisquel 11 (aramo)	Yes	Hard to use.^[12]
FAI	PureOS 10 (byzantium)	Yes^[13]		Yes	?	?	?
FAI	Trisquel 10	Yes^[14]		Yes	?	?	?
Freedombox	PureOS 10 (byzantium)	Yes^[15]	Interfaces: Web: Very easy to use No command line interface: users are expected to use the web interface to configure the services otherwise there is a risk of breaking the system. Installation: PureOS and Trisquel don't have freedombox images The installation requires to type 2 commands. Some features (like snapshots) also require specific options during the installation (like to use a btrfs filesystem).	Yes	No	?	?	Can deploy many services (wikis, etc) Can configure network services? (DHCP, WiFi, etc?)
Freedombox	Trisquel 10	Partial^[16]		Yes	No	?	?
Guix configuration language	Guix	Yes^[17]	Require to know lisp	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Can configure the whole system
	Parabola	Yes		No	Yes	Yes	Yes
	PureOS 10 (byzantium)	Yes		No	Yes	Yes	Yes
	Trisquel 11 (aramo)	Yes		No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Holo	Guix	Incompatible^[18]		Yes	?	?	?
	Parabola	Yes^[19]		Yes
	Trisquel 11	Not packaged		Yes
UCI	LibreCMC	Yes^[17]	Relatively easy to use: It has 3 interfacesthat work well together: Web Command line Configuration files Require to have some networking notions (what is an IP address, a firewall, etc)	Yes	No	No	No	Can configure network services (dhcp, WiFi access point, etc)

Package management

Almost all configuration management software can also install packages, so what is listed below are software that only do tasks related to package management (searching, installing, updating software, etc).

Program	Type	Distribution	Works	Pictures
Gnome Software	Graphical application	PureOS 10 (byzantium)	Yes	Yes
		Trisquel 11 (aramo)	No^[20]
		Guix	No^[20]
Octopi	Graphical application	Parabola	No^[21]	?
Synaptic	Graphical application	Trisquel 11 (aramo)	Yes	No^[22]
Synaptic	Graphical application	Trisquel 12 (ecne)	Yes	No^[22]

References

↑ It can be used but some features seem really tied to Debian. For instance in /usr/share/common-lisp/source/consfigurator/src/property/apt.lisp get-default-mirrors only has the URL of the Debian mirrors. So certain functions do assume a Debian system but other work fine on Debian derivatives or other non-debian related distributions.

↑ There are local or sudo connection type available

↑ This works through SSH. It needs SBCL on the remote computer to support all the features. A reduced set of features is still available if the remote computer doesn't have SBCL.

↑ This is an advertised feature but I didn't test it yet.

↑ ^5.0^5.1^5.2 This works through SSH. It also requires cockpit on the target computer.

↑ At the time of writing, the following packages are available:

cockpit-machines for virtual machines

cockpit-packagekit for installing packages

cockpit-pcp for information on system performance

cockpit-podman for managing podman containers

cockpit-storaged for managing storage through udisks

↑ It should normally work as it doesn't require too much distro specific integration.

↑ First there is no netinstall for PureOS: The existing iso installer have no netinstall option in their menu. In addition, passing 'auto=true priority=critical preseed/file=/media/preseed.cfg' as arguments before the '---' in syslinux also doesn't work.

↑ The preseed file enable to answer the questions of the netinstall installer, but it's also possible to do much more, including copying files to the target installation system or run commands inside it with preseed/late_command / in-target. The files to be copied could be provided on the same media that contains the preseed.cfg file.

↑ Unlike Trisquel 11, there is no preseed option in the installer. Passing 'auto=true priority=critical preseed/file=/media/preseed.cfg' as arguments before the '---' in syslinux also doesn't work.

↑ If you mount trisquel-netinst_11.0_amd64.iso, there is a preseed folder with an examples. However these are just example and a lot of options are not documented anywhere. https://preseed.debian.net/debian-preseed/ has a more complete list of options for Debian, so by combining both you can use them as documentation and somehow manage to make it what you want to do with some trial and errors along the way.

↑ Tested with a local PureOS installation. I reconfigured the system with '/usr/sbin/fai -vNu $HOSTNAME softupdate || true' as root and by having the FAI files in '/root/config'.

↑ It's used by the FSF so it works

↑ PureOS 10 (byzantium) is based on Debian Bullseye, which is supports Freedombox (reference: "Currently, FreedomBox works in Debian Stable (Bullseye), Testing (Bookworm), and Unstable (Sid). " in the Debian wiki page about Freedombox. Installing Mediawiki also works well while in Trisquel it fails.

↑ Tested with the Debian instructions on Trisquel 10. After installing Trisquel with the default graphical install with the default partitioning or with the textual installation and selecting nothing in "software selection", and installing freedombox, installing Mediawiki broke apt because mysql didn't find its data directory.

↑ ^17.0^17.1 It's the distribution native configuration interface so it works.

↑ Holo use the distribution package manager to handle the configuration, but holo-build only supports deb, pacman and rpm packages formats.

↑ It was added by the distribution so it works.

↑ ^20.0^20.1 For some reasons it doesn't find any applications installed or that can be installed.

↑ Currently broken, needs to be updated and recompiled.

↑ This is currently broken, probably due to some configuration change on the screenshot server. It is fixed in synaptic upstream with the commit 2cded3bf23fe6927a19d60c7febdafee992130ad("fix downloading screenshots") but at the time of writing this didn't made it in a release.

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Configuration management

Package management

References

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