[Neurodebian-users] Software installation

[Bennet Fauber]

Yaroslav,

We're trying to get one 'management' scheme set up to handle a variety
of cases.  Currently, we're looking at taking a stock Xbuntu
installation, adding to that the ND respositories, pre-installing a
subset of the available ND applications (say, the Neurophysiology and
Medical Imaging programs), and finally adding some local customization
for our environment (for example, kerberos and ldap configuration).
None of us are adept at creating .deb installations, and for many
service configurations, a simple shell script or an Ansible playbook
would be fine and probably require less overhead.

We are anticipating that some subset of the installations will be on
physical machines, some on virtual machines.  Some of the virtual
machines will be on VMs in our 'cloud' and will remain under out
control; some will be on people's laptops and may well stick around
for some time (think of graduate students) but will eventually leave
our environment, and some will be here just for the workshop and will
leave immediately.  We'd like to be able to install appropriately for
all.

> I found ansible handy to provide such initial or maintain continuous
> "uniform" setup across boxes, since you might want to tune some
> configuration as well, not just install a bunch of packages.

If you'd be willing to share some more details of your Ansible setup
with us, that would be extremely helpful, as that is precisely what we
are planning for the machines that remain resident and would be
remotely reachable.  We have just decided on Ansible in April, and
none of us are experienced with it, so any leg up would be greatly
appreciated.

We have been a RHEL/CentOS shop for so long our minds have grown weak.  ;-)

-- bennet

On Mon, May 9, 2016 at 8:36 AM, Yaroslav Halchenko
<debian at onerussian.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, 09 May 2016, Bennet Fauber wrote:
>
>> I will be installing a number of instances of ND, and I would like to
>> preinstall a selection of software as the users will not be able to
>> use sudo.  Is there a handy way to install everything?
>
> Define "everything".  Unlikely you want or need to install actually
> everything available from debian/neurodebian repositories.  It might not
> be even possible since some packages might conflict
>
>> I was thinking
>> that maybe I could grep from the .desktop files all the lines that
>> match
>
>> Exec=nd-autoinstall ...
>
>> and run it from the command line, but the format seems not to be
>> entirely consistent, e.g., sometimes there is a -p sometimes not,
>
>> nd-autoinstall afni
>> nd-autoinstall -p caret
>
>> and sometimes there is more than one version, e.g.,
>> fsl-5.0-core:fsl-5.0-core.desktop and
>> neurodebian-desktop:neurodebian-fsl-4.1.desktop both seem to get
>> installed.
>
>> It also seems that nd-autoinstall may actually start the application
>> after installation, which isn't desired.
>
> that was the purpose of the nd-autoinstall script -- to install if not
> yet installed and start.  If you just need to install, use plain
>
> apt-get install package1 package2 ...
>
> command
>
>> Any thoughts from people who may have deployed ND machines to, say, a
>> classroom, would be appreciated.
>
> Note that at the end of the VM welcome wizard we give options for some
> common selections.  Once again -- what collection of things you would
> like to install?
>
> I found ansible handy to provide such initial or maintain continuous
> "uniform" setup across boxes, since you might want to tune some
> configuration as well, not just install a bunch of packages.
>
> --
> Yaroslav O. Halchenko
> Center for Open Neuroscience     http://centerforopenneuroscience.org
> Dartmouth College, 419 Moore Hall, Hinman Box 6207, Hanover, NH 03755
> Phone: +1 (603) 646-9834                       Fax: +1 (603) 646-1419
> WWW:   http://www.linkedin.com/in/yarik