Kickstart support info

[Marc MERLIN]

Hi,

I'm looking at Ubuntu to replace a bunch of RH machines, and well, from
the little I looked at it, installing ubuntu or debian with d-i is very
tedious. I'm not even sure what's possible or what isn't (the docs I
found were sparse), and when you get something wrong, the installer
falls out of automatic mode, and you have to guess how to fix it.
Maybe I missed some docs that make this less painful, but 
http://d-i.alioth.debian.org/manual/en.i386/ch04s07.html#automatic-install
or the ubuntu equivalent page, don't give a lot of info.

So, I became very interested in your kickstart work, since, well, it is
really all I need and I already have kickstart files.

My requirements are:
- I need a fully automated install: the installer cannot stop to ask
  questions, it has to do a full unattended install
- I absolutely need %pre and %post support
- md and lvm would be nice, but they don't seem supported yet, and I can
  probably kludge in %pre as long as the installer then knows who to use
  the partitions I created and mounted

More specifically, here's an example of: what I use:
http://marc.merlins.org/tmp/ks.srv_raid1.cfg_http

I can fixup auth after the fact if you don't support it, by just
dropping config files in %post, as I already do anyway. As for md/lvm,
well, I'll kludge in shell in %pre if I have to.
Stuff like this has to work though:
network --bootproto dhcp --device=eth0
(it can't stop to ask for eth0 or eth1. Ideally, it would dhcp on both
interfaces and use the first one it got an answer on, but hardcoding
eth0 would be ok)

For the rest, random package questions, I'm hoping I can delay those until
after they get installed (haven't looked into how debconf seeding for
random packages works, or how ubuntu pre-answers questions for so many
debian packages)

So what do you say: do I have a shot with kickstart or should I resign
myself to d-i and hope I can make it work?

BTW where are the latest docs:
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/KickstartCompatibility looks a bit old

http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/hoary/main/installer-i386/current/doc/manual/en/ch04s06.html#id2531034
looks newer (BTW, it's not exactly easy to find :)

Is there anything else I should be looking at?

Thanks
Marc
-- 
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Microsoft is to operating systems & security ....
                                      .... what McDonalds is to gourmet cooking
Home page: http://marc.merlins.org/   |   Finger marc_f at merlins.org for PGP key