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6.8 KiB
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124 lines
6.8 KiB
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Introduction to Anaconda
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========================
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Anaconda is the installation program used by Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux
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and some other distributions.
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During installation, a target computer's hardware is identified and configured
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and the appropriate file systems for the system's architecture are created.
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Finally, anaconda allows the user to install the operating system software on
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the target computer. Anaconda can also upgrade existing installations of
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earlier versions of the same distribution. After the installation is complete,
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you can reboot into your installed system and continue doing customization
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using the initial setup program.
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Anaconda is a fairly sophisticated installer. It supports installation from
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local and remote sources such as CDs and DVDs, images stored on a hard drive,
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NFS, HTTP, and FTP. Installation can be scripted with kickstart to provide a
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fully unattended installation that can be duplicated on scores of machines. It
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can also be run over RDP on headless machines. A variety of advanced storage
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devices including LVM, RAID, iSCSI, and multipath are supported from the
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partitioning program. Anaconda provides advanced debugging features such as
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remote logging, access to the python interactive debugger, and remote saving of
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exception dumps.
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For more news about Anaconda development and planned features you can follow
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`our blog <https://rhinstaller.wordpress.com>`_.
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History
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-------
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(The following was contributed by David Cantrell
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<dcantrell@redhat.com> with some minor corrections and additions by Matt Wilson
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(formerly <msw@redhat.com>) and is probably 85% to 95% accurate. History
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is hard to keep track of, but this is what I can recall being both in
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the industry at the time but not at Red Hat.)
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So the Anaconda code base that we all started with began in 1999 or
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so, but it was not the original installer used by Red Hat Linux. Like
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many distributions at the time, the installation process was hand
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crafted and consisted of a series of steps executed by a collection of
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different programs and tools (shell scripts or Perl scripts or custom
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programs and so on). The original source code for the installer
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was shipped on the CD, and you can find it in the Red Hat Linux
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download archives up until the `6.0 release <https://archive.download.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/6.0/en/os/i386/misc/src/install/>`_.
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OK, so Anaconda. Back in the late 1990s there was a huge push of
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money in to Linux companies. Red Hat itself was founded in 1993 and
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by the late 90s was a large company. SuSE was another big one. I
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worked for a company called Walnut Creek CDROM (ftp.cdrom.com) which
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sponsored FreeBSD and Slackware Linux. Out in Utah in the United
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States there was a company called Caldera that made a distribution
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called OpenLinux (there's actually a lot more history here, Caldera's
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product called Caldera Network Desktop was based on Red Hat Linux and
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LST (Linux Support Team) Power Linux was based on Slackware
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Linux...LST Power Linux became OpenLinux).
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Caldera was founded by former Novell employees and the focus was on
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business customers. Red Hat was still just trying to make a general
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purpose system and the industry as a whole tended to view the main
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competitor to Linux as Windows. Caldera was trying to make an
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enterprise operating system. The late 1990s saw the first dedicated
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Linux trade shows. No longer did Linux companies go to COMDEX or
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Windows World. We now had the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo. And I
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was at the first one. And the second, and third, ... all the way
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until LWCE stopped being an event. Companies were using LWCE to drop
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huge product announcements. Well Caldera had an announcement at one
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of these events.
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They announced the next version of Caldera OpenLinux and one of its
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big features was a graphical installer. This was huge. This was the
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first Linux distribution to feature a graphical installer program.
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They wrote it in C++, and it used the Qt GUI windowing toolkit in
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`partnership with Trolltech <https://rant.gulbrandsen.priv.no/linux/openlinux-lizard>`_.
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Everyone was impressed with how easily it was to use. Bob Young,
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at that time CEO of Red Hat, `gave due credit <https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3553>`_
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for the slickness in the "happy path" of Linux OS installation with
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Lizard. But he also called out that there was no "back" button.
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Since installing packages took a long time back then, Caldera even
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put games in the installer. You could play Tetris during
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installation (side note, Be did that in BeOS too
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several years before).
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They named their installer "Lizard". Why? Well, back in the 90s,
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every UI thing tended to emulate the Windows "wizard work flow". The
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series of dialog boxes with Next and Back buttons. Windows created
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that workflow and people felt comfortable with it. They went with
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Lizard as a combination of "Linux wizard". (side note: this is why
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you can sometimes see references to "druids" in old Red Hat
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documentation, such as "Disk Druid". No, it's not a wizard like
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Windows, it's a druid!)
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Caldera got a lot of patents for the installer, including being able
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to play a game during installation which is, incidentally, why we
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never did that in Anaconda. Well, there's also the fact that
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folks at Red Hat took trademarks very `seriously <https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=224627>`_,
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and worked hard to avoid shipping a game of falling blocks under
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that name.
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OK, so Caldera has made Lizard. Now Red Hat needed to act. They
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created a new installer project to focus on this graphical installer.
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The installer up to this point was all written in C, and development
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was relatively slow due to the low level of the language. To move
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fast, Erik Troan decided to build a new installer with the UI workflows
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written in Python. Erik went with the name "Anaconda" because (a) it
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is written in Python and an Anaconda snake is a type of python and
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(b) the Anaconda snake eats lizards in the wild. It was one of a long
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line of creatively named software modules that Erik wrote as part of the
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installer. There was
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"`pump <https://archive.download.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/6.2/en/os/i386/misc/src/anaconda/pump/>`_",
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a bootp / DHCP client library, so named because (a) A pump is a kind
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of shoe, like a `boot[p] <https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/bionic/man8/pump.8.html#quibble>`_
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and (b) "plumb"ing up a network interface is like priming a "pump".
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And there was
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"`balkan <https://archive.download.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/6.2/en/os/i386/misc/src/anaconda/balkan/>`_",
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a library to handle partition tables, so named because the Balkans have
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always had to deal with partitioning.
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And that's how we got the name Anaconda for the installer. Caldera
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eventually disappeared entirely. OpenLinux didn't go anywhere. But
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Caldera really tried. The last thing they did? They bought SCO and
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renamed themselves to SCO and sued IBM for infringing on original Unix
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code in Linux. We all know how that turned out. :)
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