Many articles have been written about stand-alone installation of Linux. Over the last few years the model for Linux has been for one off, custom installs. The lone hacker at home or a customized server providing specialist networking services has been where Linux has made it big. Distribution makers like RedHat and Caldera have put a lot of effort into facilitating this type of install.

As Linux moves mainstream, though, another modus operandi will become more common. This is similar machines operating together on a LAN or other network. The users of such machines will be customizing their user interfaces, but the real work of setting them up will become a task for computer professionals. Linux has the tools already in place for installing quickly and efficiently on such clusters and this article is aimed at system administrators and other IT professionals who will need to install Linux distributions en masse.

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