Just finished up a little side project for AOOI. Until now its debian support had been somewhat limited if you were in a grub environment. I'm more familiar with the RedHat/CentOS/Fedora way of updating kernels and grub via the command line using the grubby utility. This is the same thing that kernel rpms use to automatically update the menu.lst used by grub to use the newer kernel. Debian has something like this, called update-grub which has a similar role, but without the same command line capabilities as grubby. For example, with grubby I can do this:

/sbin/grubby --add-kernel=/boot/vmlinuz.atomic --initrd /boot/initrd.img.atomic --title "Atomic"  --copy-default --args="ks=http://www.atomicorp.com/installers/AOOI/ks-$ARCH.cfg ip=$IPADDR netmask=$NETMASK gateway=$GATEWAY dns=$DNS"

Which results in adding an entry to  top of menu.lst (or /etc/grub.conf, for those of you that like shortcuts) and passes in additional parameters to the kernel which we need to pass to anaconda. Debian, and I suspect Ubuntu, don't have a native way of doing this, rather relying on the admin to manually make changes to the menu.lst after the fact. You just run update-grub and it will populate the menu.lst with whatever it finds in /boot. Shortcut yes, but not really what I need to re-image a box in AOOI. So taking the short cut as I am want to do, I just generate my own menu.lst a la cat << EOF > menu.lst and viola... I completely hose the old settings. Functional? Yes. Totally uncool, you bet. :P But hey, we were blowing away the original (debian/ubuntu) OS anyway, so its not like we were killing a prod box anyway....

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