Full installer Preseed reference?

[Tom H]

On Fri, Jul 29, 2016 at 7:18 AM, Josef Wolf <jw at raven.inka.de> wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 27, 2016 at 09:42:22AM -0400, Tom H wrote:
>> On Wed, Jul 27, 2016 at 3:16 AM, Lukas Erlacher <erlacher at in.tum.de> wrote:


>>> how can I find out which commands are supported in the
>>> debian-installer preseed process?
>>
>> Good luck with that.
>>
>> I've given up on preseed because, even though I'd set up a good
>> preseed file that I could adapt for different situations, there's no
>> complete reference, different versions have different behaviors (as we
>> saw recently on this list) and it's impossible to specify exact
>> partition sizes.
>
> Yes, it's kind of PITA. I am doing this for about 10 years. With every new
> release, something breaks and you have to find out why/how it breaks and how
> to get it working again. Neither documentation nor google are of much help in
> this process, so you have to pollute the mailing lists to find out what's
> going on.

If you add "DEBCONF_DEBUG=5" to the kernel cmdline and you'll then be
able to switch to the logging VT to find out which variable's blocking
the installation.


>> I now have tarfiles, like ubuntu-core, that I unpack onto filesystem
>> and then run scripts to finish the setup.
>
> Is this something like debootstrap?

I use deboostrap to create an install and then tar it.