help with package installation in Ubuntu kickstart

[Colin Watson]

On Tue, Jun 26, 2007 at 12:36:55PM -0400, Rohit Kumar Mehta wrote:
> Hi guys, I am still fighting with getting certain packages to install in 
> a noninteractive kickstart.
> 
> It does a wonderful job at getting all the basics right for our 
> different machines (most hardware, the partioning and X work great!)
> which is why I want to use it.  However I am having some trouble getting 
> our customizations working. The only way I know how to work around this 
> is with an ugly hack, that is to put my finish script in 
> /etc/rc2.d/S99_one_time_script.sh and make it rm itself and reboot when 
> finished.
> 
> I can install most packages fine via the %packages directive in my 
> ks.cfg, however certain packages like krb5-user are not found.  I tried 
> including "universe" with the following:
> preseed --owner base-config apt-setup/universe boolean true
> url --url http://aptmania.engr.uconn.edu/mirror/ubuntu
> but I still see in syslog "Package krb5-user has no installation candidate"
> 
> In /target/etc/apt/sources.list.apt-setup, universe is included
> but /target/etc/apt/sources.list contains only:
> deb cdrom:[...feisty...]/ feisty main restricted

OK, so apt-setup needs to do this to make standard installations work
right: if you're installing from a CD, you don't want to download stuff
from the network. It's certainly not ideal if you're doing a preseeded
installation.

However, if you simply do a netboot installation instead of an
installation from CD, apt-setup won't do this, and you'll be able to
install packages from universe.

> I tried ignoring the %packages option and kickstart finish script.  I 
> simply wget'ed the sources.list I wanted, and ran a bunch of apt-get 
> commands.  However, for some reason I cannot get it to install packages 
> noninteractively however.  I tried setting the DEBIAN_FRONTEND variable, 
> modifying /etc/debconf, and modifying /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/70debconf, but 
> none of these seem to make any difference from the installer.

Yeah, it's possible to do it that way but you need to know a good deal
about installer internals to set it up. I'd just switch to netboot
installations and otherwise do what you were doing. If you must boot
from a physical CD, there's a netboot mini.iso (e.g. [1]) that will let
you boot from a CD but otherwise use netboot-like behaviour.

[1] http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/feisty/main/installer-i386/current/images/netboot/mini.iso

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]