Anaconda

Anaconda is the installation program used by Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and some other distributions.

During installation, a target computer’s hardware is identified and configured, and the appropriate file systems for the system’s architecture are created. Finally, Anaconda allows the user to install the operating system software on the target computer. Anaconda can also upgrade existing installations of earlier versions of the same distribution. After the installation is complete, you can reboot into your installed system and continue doing customization using initial setup.

Anaconda is a fairly sophisticated installer. It supports installation from local and remote sources such as CDs and DVDs, images stored on a hard drive, NFS, HTTP, and FTP. Installation can be scripted with kickstart to provide a fully unattended installation that can be duplicated on scores of machines. It can also be run over VNC on headless machines. A variety of advanced storage devices including LVM, RAID, iSCSI, and multipath are supported from the partitioning program. Anaconda provides advanced debugging features such as remote logging, access to the python interactive debugger, and remote saving of exception dumps.

If you are an advanced user of Anaconda, you should check out our reference to Anaconda command line options, our kickstart file format documentation and our reference to logging capabilities of Anaconda.