20 years ago, on December 20, 1999 FAI 1.0 was released. Many things have happened since then. Some milestones:
- 1999: version 1.0
- 2000: first official Debian package
- 2001: first detailed user report ("No complete installs. Teething problems.")
- 2005: Wiki page and IRC
- 2005: FAI CD
- 2006: fai dirinstall
- 2007: new partitioning tool setup-storage
- 2009: new web design
- 2014: brtfs support
- 2016: autodiscover function, profiles menu
- 2016: fai-diskimage, cloud images
- 2017: cross architecture builds
- 2017: Fai.me web service
- 2020: UEFI support
Besides that, a lot of other things happened in the FAI project. Apart from the first report, we got more than 300 detailed reports containing positive feedback. We had several FAI developers meetings and I did more than 40 talks about FAI all over the world. We had a discussion about an alleged GPL violation of FAI in the past, I did several attempts to get a logo for FAI, but we still do not have one. We moved from subversion to git, which was very demanding for me. The FAI.me service for customized installation and cloud images was used more than 5000 times. The Debian Cloud team now uses FAI to build the official Debian cloud images.
I'm very happy with the outcome of this project and I like to thank all people who contributed to FAI in the past 20 years!
This week, I've released the new FAI version 5.9. It supports UEFI boot from CD/DVD and USB stick. Also two new tools were added:
- fai-sed - call sed on a file but check for changes before writing
- fai-link - create symlink idempotent
UEFI support in fai-cd only used grub, no syslinux or isolinux is needed. New FAI installation images are also available from
https://fai-project.org/fai-cd
The FAI.me build service is also using the newest FAI version and the customized ISO images can now be booted in an UEFI environment.