Hands off Install - yes and no

[Colin Watson]

On Wed, Mar 23, 2005 at 06:45:33PM -0600, Carl Karsten wrote:
> I am now watching a box load up the base system from a local server and 
> the only thing I did to it was turn it on.  yipee.

It's good, isn't it?

> Here is my pxelinux.cfg/default
> 
> label linux
>         kernel linux
>         append initrd=initrd.gz ramdisk_size=12890 root=/dev/rd/0 rw 
> preseed/locale=en_US kbd-chooser/method=us netcfg/wireless_wep= 
> netcfg/choose_interface=eth1 netcfg/get_hostname= 
> preseed/url=http://192.168.1.22/preseed.cfg --
> 
> However, I still have some issues.
> 
> I would like the same for a server install.  That doesn't seem so hard, 
> but I ran out of space passing kernel options. The above is 214, and the 
> extra "base-config/package-selection= 
> base-config/install-language-support=false" is 73, which puts it at 287 
> which is 17 too many.

Those don't need to be in kernel arguments; put them in a preseed file
instead (say, server.cfg).

  base-config base-config/package-selection string
  base-config base-config/install-language-support boolean false

Also, I just realised that there's a simple way to get rid of several of
your kernel arguments; sorry for not noticing it sooner. Rewrite as
follows:

  label linux
          kernel linux
          append DEBCONF_PRIORITY=critical initrd=initrd.gz ramdisk_size=12890 root=/dev/rd/0 rw preseed/locale=en_US netcfg/choose_interface=eth1 preseed/url=http://192.168.1.22/preseed.cfg --

Raising the debconf priority to critical means that the installer asks
fewer questions and assumes more default answers (but it goes further
than just "sane defaults", so it isn't appropriate for interactive
installations); it's designed for automatic installations.

> Not to mention "-- BOOT_IMAGE=linux" gets tacked on to the end by
> something, and it does seem to be included in the 255 limit.  Not sure
> if anything needs it, so that may not be important.

syslinux adds BOOT_IMAGE=, and as far as I know you can't stop it.
However, with the above you should have more than enough space.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]