How often have you done debootsetup installs?
It doesn't take any longer realy, and actually you generally end up with a leaner machine since there is extra stuff that the normal installer uses.
And with the kernel stuff, if you do the 'debian way' you end up with a kernel package you can just install on every machine.
It's not like you have to sit there babysitting the systems either. Just use ssh to setup the first system. I've installed Debian from miles away, no sweat. All I have to do is make sure I have ssh access to the machine.
I don't blame you for not wanting to do it. I'd be dissapointed too that Debian made stuff harder for you because of their politics.
But it doesn't have to even be Debian. Similar techniques work well for Ubuntu or any other system you'd like. It's just that with Debian other people have already done it and setup guides and such for it before you.
Installing from cdrom is realy a irritating and slow way of doing things.
First off generally you need to have hardware just for the install that you don't need at any time else. Stuff like keyboards, video cards, monitors, mice, etc. That stuff is fairly worthless on a server unless there is something bad with the hardware. It's just extra stuff you have to cart around with you.
For example. It's fairly easy to do a PXE boot for a Linux system.
What you'd do is setup a DHCP server, NFS, and a tftp server. Setup a netboot a generic Linux setup with ssh access. Boot your systems off the network, disk-less style with nfs. Ssh into the machines. You already have a system setup in a tarball that you've prepared. Untar it, run the script to setup the hostname, ip address, routing, fstab, whatever other custom configurations you want, and give it a root password.
Script takes 20 seconds, the tarball maybe 15 minutes or whatever to untar. Your finished, reboot the machine, move on to the next one.
That is even to much work for some people. You have FAI project:
http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/
This is for managing massive amounts of machines.
Boot it off the system of the network, it does it itself. You use a configuration engine like Cfengine to have the custom configurations already setup for the machines. Start up a bunch of new workstations, go home, come back to a datacenter.
😛
Then the nice thing about a configuration engine is that your not having to ssh into every machine. You have it setup for Sun or Windows or Linux or whatever. Plus it has logging and roles and such for good auditing. )It's still a pain in the rear to setup though)
Of course you also setup a apt-proxy like apt-proxy or approx so your not installing off the internet like a weenie all the time, but from local LAN cache were it goes very fast. As fast a pushing down system images.
🙂
I know it's not what you want to do right now and the preperation takes more effort for you then just walking around with a bunch of burnt cdroms, but keep in mind that there are many ways to skin a cat.
