daily instal testing

[Colin Watson]

On Fri, Mar 18, 2005 at 11:33:02AM -0600, Carl Karsten wrote:
> 1. Is there a way to automate the install?  something like "...kickstart
> for Red Hat, yast and alice for SuSE, lui from IBM or Jumpstart for SUN
> Solaris." - http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/

Kickstart works with Hoary, to at least some extent; d-i preseeding also
works. For the latter, see:

  http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/hoary/main/installer-i386/current/doc/manual/en/ch04s06.html#id2530875

Joey Hess has a farm of machines doing automatic installation tests for
Debian on a variety of architectures. The same thing should be possible
for Ubuntu.

> It would be great if I could make a floppy with either Grub or Smart
> Boot Manager floppy that also had my install options on it, it would
> boot the CD and somehow pass a parameter to use the floppy.

My best suggestion for testing CD installations automatically is to put
the kernel and initrd from /cdrom/install/ on a TFTP server and then
netboot the target system using PXE or similar (making sure that your
BIOS is set to boot from LAN before booting from CD, so that you can
leave the CD inserted). You then get to customise the boot loader
configuration fairly easily to add whatever boot arguments you need.

> 2. The image I currently has says it was built on 20041227-Ubuntu20 -
> but the md5sum checks out with the current file I got manually.  Did I
> miss something, or is that just for the installer?  I am looking for a
> quick way to tell if the CD is really the new version.  Boot screen
> would be ideal.

Look at /cdrom/.disk/info. The "date" displayed there is actually the
version number of the installer initrd.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]