The FAI.me service for creating customized installation and cloud images now supports the backports kernel for the stable release Debian 12 (aka bookworm). If you enable the backports option in the web interface, you currently get kernel 6.4. This will help you if you have newer hardware that is not support by the default kernel 6.1. The backports option is also still available for the older distributions.
The web interface of the FAI.me service is available at
The counter of the FAI.me build service has reached 20.000. This counter was added shortly after the service was started in November 2017. Since then, this service has built more than 21.000 installation images and more than 1300 cloud disk images. In the last few month we had averaged 100 requests per week.
Some statistics which settings are popular:
Language/keyboard layout selected
12000 us 4000 de 2500 fr 800 gb 500 es 300 ru 300 cn 200 pt Desktop environments selected
12000 NONE (without any desktop) 5000 GNOME 1800 XFCE 800 KDE 700 CINNAMON 700 MATE 500 LXDE In April 2023, support for building your own Ubuntu installation ISO was added. Since then, 200 Ubuntu ISOs has been created.
Packages that are often added: tmux screen apt-transport-https build-essential sudo net-tools mc git wget htop vim curl
A postinst script was provided more that 1500 times even though it was not added until 2021.
- Packages from backports were used 4000 times.
I still have some more ideas for the future: Build your own custom Live ISO
Thanks for all your feedback I got to improve this service.
The build service is available on the FAI project website at https://fai-project.org/FAIme
After Debian 12 aka bookworm was released yesterday, I've also created new FAI ISO images using Debian 12.
The defaut ISO (large) uses FAI 6.0.3, kernel 6.1 and can install the XFCE and GNOME desktop without internet connection, since all needed packages are included into the ISO. Additional you can install Ubuntu 22.04 or Rocky Linux 9 with this FAI ISO. During these installations, the packages will be downloade via network. There's also the variant FAI ISO UBUNTU, which includes all Ubuntu packages needed for a Ubuntu server or Ubuntu desktop installation.
If you need a small image, you can take the FAI ISO small, which only includes the packages for a XFCE desktop without LibreOffice. This ISO is only 880MB in size.
Currently I'm working on a new feature, so FAI can create Live images, that are bootable. It's like the tool live-build which Debian uses for their official Debian Live images. A first verison of the ISO using the XFCE desktop can be downloaded from
https://fai-project.org/fai-cd
There you also find all other FAI ISOs.
After the initial installation of a new machine, you often want to login as root via ssh. Therefore it's convenient to provide a ssh public key for a passwordless login.
This can now be done by just adding your user name from salsa.debian.org, gitlab.com or github.com. You can also give a customized URL from where to download the keys. Before it was only possible to use a github account name.
The FAI.me build service then creates a customized installation ISO for you, which will automatically install the ssh public key into the root account. Also the ready-to-boot cloud images support this feature.
The build service is available on the FAI project website at https://fai-project.org/FAIme
A new service is available on the FAI project website https://fai-project.org/FAIme
Build your own customized installation ISO for Ubuntu!
You can select if you want to install an Ubuntu LTS 22.04 server or desktop and enable Ubuntu LTS packages which are also called Hardware Enablement (HWE). Different disk partition schemes including LVM are available and you can select a language and keyboard layout and add your own list of packages which are then automatically installed from the customized installation media. It's possible to upload your public ssh key or specify your github account name for easy access to the root account.
Advanced users may upload a postinst script, which can be executed during the first boot of the computer. It's also possible to add options for grub.
After more than 13 years, I've launched a new design for the FAI project web site
It now uses Materialize CSS and will work much better on mobile devices. Thanks to Thorsten Bülo who did the first part of converting the web pages to the new design.
I hope you all enjoy the new layout.
After more than a year, a new major FAI release is ready to download.
Following new features are included:
- add support for release specification in package_config via release=<name>
- the partitioning tool now supports partition labels with GPT
- support partition labels and partition uuids in fstab
- support for Alpine Linux and Arch Linux package managers in install_packages
- Ubuntu 22.04 and Rocky Linux 9 support added
- add support for NVme devices in fai-kvm
- add ssh key for root remote access using classes
We have included a lot of bug fixes for free of course.
Even if FAI 6.0 will only be included into Debian bookworm, you can install it on a bullseye FAI server and create a nfsroot using bookworm without any problems. The combination of a bullseye FAI server with FAI 6.0 and a bullseye nfsroot should also work.
New ISO images are available at https://fai-project.org/fai-cd/
The FAI.me build service is not yet using FAI 6.0, but support will be added in the future.
The FAI.me service for creating customized installation and cloud images now supports a backports kernel for the stable release Debian 11 (aka bullseye). If you enable the backports option, you will currently get kernel 5.14. This will help you if you have newer hardware that is not support by the default kernel 5.10. The backports option is also still available for the images when using the old Debian 10 (buster) release.
The URL of the FAI.me service is
I've created new ISO images for FAI. Now, they install Debian 11 using kernel 5.10. The ISOs are available from
https://fai-project.org/fai-cd
There's also a Ubuntu version of the FAI CD which installs Ubuntu LTS 20.04 in two variants. A desktop and a server installation is available.
If you want to install the Debian oldstable version (Debian 10), please use the FAI.me service.
The FAIme service now supports uploading a custom shell script. This script is added to the installation ISO and gets executed during the first boot on request. You can upload a plain shell script or a compressed version using gzip. Using the postinst script you can adjust the new installed system to your local needs after FAI has done the initial installation.
The FAIme service is a web service, that creates customized installation images by just a few clicks. It's also possible to create custom cloud images via the web interface.
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