Kickstart support info

[Colin Watson]

On Mon, Apr 11, 2005 at 12:24:20PM -0700, Marc MERLIN wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 11, 2005 at 07:07:31PM +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
> > Most things that the code can do are possible; there are a few
> > exceptions, mostly in the partitioner. Preseeding (don't call this
> > automatic installation mode "d-i", please - Kickstart is part of our d-i
> > too) is direct control of the debconf database. Our Kickstart support is
> 
> Aaah, I didn't realize it just presed d-i. That makes more sense than what I
> thought (completely different install mode)
> That's very nice, thanks for coming up with that.
> 
> > in fact more or less a translation layer on top of preseeding, so mixing
> > the two is entirely possible.
> 
> Even better. Does this mean that you give both preseed files on the command
> line and d-i will sort it out?

Yeah. ks= is processed first; preseed/file= or preseed/url= is dealt
with later.

> > > - I absolutely need %pre and %post support
> > 
> > That's fine. Note that the only interpreter available outside the chroot
> > is /bin/sh.
> 
> Right, I had only read 
> http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/KickstartCompatibility
> then, which said no %pre.
> Cool.

Meh, I hadn't realised people were cutting and pasting my mailing list
posts into Wiki pages. It's late now, but I've left that URL open in my
browser and will see if I can find time to update it (or replace it with
a link to the installation manual) tomorrow.

%pre worked fine in Array CD 6, as far as I know, so I don't know what
that comment was about. %post in the chroot was broken, and %packages
sort of worked although it didn't support groups yet.

> Can I use %packages too?

Yes. The only package groups you can use are "Ubuntu Desktop" (or
"ubuntu-desktop") and "Kubuntu Desktop" (or "kubuntu-desktop"),
depending on your installation source.

> > > - 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
> > 
> > Yeah, those are two of the partitioning-related exceptions I mentioned
> > above. Disk detection before %pre will be fun (though the way hotplug
> > happens early may save you here, provided that your disk modules are in
> > the initrd), and you may have to preseed a few bits of the partitioner
> > by hand, which is likely to be messy. I'm sorry this is far from ideal
> > as yet.
> 
> As long as I can work around it, it's a whole lot better than nothing :)
> I do realize that it's hard to get right, even RH doesn't have it working
> perfectly after 5-6 years of having come up with kickstart.

Let me know about problems; I'm interested in how things work out in
practice.

> > Basically you'll need to mount /target etc., and then convince the
> > partitioner to run straight through without modifying anything.
> 
> I figured that'd be the case.
> So what would I put in kickstart then for partitions? 
> Will d-i work if the partitions are mounted and I put nothing in the
> kickstart part section?

I don't expect that you'll be able to do this part with pure Kickstart.
Something like this in a preseed file might work:

  d-i partman-auto/init_automatically_partition select Manually edit partition table
  d-i partman-auto/choose_partition string Finish partitioning and write changes to disk
  d-i partman/confirm boolean true

(totally untested, though)

> Actually, is there a generic way to preseed a question disable: can I tell
> xorg: don't generate config file?

No generic way, since packages generally don't ask debconf questions of
the form "may I set this package up so that it actually works". :-) I
don't think xserver-xorg will overwrite an existing customised
/etc/X11/xorg.conf, though.

> Eventually, some examples of kickstart files that are ok, info on using
> kickstart+preseed and what overrides what,

Preseeding comes second, so it always overrides Kickstart.

> and so forth would be useful, but I'll see if I can contribute example
> files to you after I sort this out (if you don't have any yourself)

That would be good, thanks. All I have so far are my own test files
(which aren't real-world, and are more test cases for particular pieces
of code I was developing) or files kindly sent to me by Red Hat users
(which will need customisation before they'll work on Ubuntu, and so
don't make good examples).

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]