Ideas thrown around for Fully Automated Installations
I think Holger had interest in this topic, IIRC...
A few days ago, I had a look at the lowmem package in d-i, for fixing
it.
I discovered that this was a very simple package which basically sets
a few d-i debconf variables before any other package is used:
#!/bin/sh
. /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
db_title "Low memory"
db_input critical debian-installer/lowmem || true
db_go || true
db_set debian-installer/framebuffer false
db_set languagechooser/language-name "English"
db_fset languagechooser/language-name seen true
db_set debian-installer/locale "en_US"
db_set countrychooser/country "US"
db_fset countrychooser/country-name seen true
db_fset countrychooser/country-name-shortlist seen true
.../...
Then after it, languagechooser and countrychooser are just jumped
over...
I started thinking about a very simple package (let's name it
"automate") which just:
-runs very early
-loads the floppy module
-read a file from the floppy (FAT16 formatted) with simple debconf
variables settings (and comments):
# This for choosing language
# Allowed values: English, French, German...
languagechooser/language-name "French"
# This for choosing country or region
# Use ISO-3166 code
countrychooser/country "FR"
# Please choose a valid locale
debian-installer/locale "fr_FR"
console-keymaps-at/keymap "fr-latin0"
netcfg/use_dhcp true
netcfg/get_hostname "mykerinos"
netcfg/get_domain "domain"
.../...
-feed debconf with these values (small script to be written)
-run the installer
I have chosen floppy as support because we can guess (maybe wrongly)
that this is the most common thing we have on machines and because
it's probably not too much costly having the module on the initrd....
Some of these ideas are maybe stupid, or too simple, but I think that
having this at the minimum would already be a great progress towards
fully automated installs.
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