Re: stuck on preseed "file may be corrupted"

[Matt Price <matt.price@utoronto.ca>]

On Mon, 2005-10-10 at 18:35 -0400, Joey Hess wrote:
> Matt Price wrote:
> > 
> > I keep getting this "preconfiguration file failed to load; file may be
> > corrupt" error during the install. This seems to happen no matter what
> > I do; e.g. I've tried replacing my first efforts with
> > debconf-get-selections > my.seed 

> > I'm not sure what else to do.  I've attached a copy of my preseed
> > file, but in case it doesn't come through I put a copy of all the
> > relevant stuff here:
> > 
> > http://www.racesci.org/LearningExchangeCD/isolinux/isolinux.cfg
> > http://www.racesci.org/LearningExchangeCD/preseed/learnexchange.seed
> 
> One problem with your file is that you use more than one character of
> whitespace here:
> 
> d-i     debian-installer/kernel/image   string  linux-386
>                                                ^
> The extra whitespace is included in the preseeded value. This does not
> explain the proble you described.
> 
> Your preseed file uses \ for line continuation. I do not know what
> version of Ubuntu supports this feature, which I only implemented last
> month, IIRC. This is the most likely problem.
> 
> If you have your preseed file inside the installer, you can do the
> preseeding by hand with "debconf-set-selections file". If
> debconf-set-selections fails without any useful message, it's a shell
> script; you can add set -x to the top and use normal shell script
> debugging techniques to figure out what's going on.
> 
Joey,

thanks for this, you were right on the money!  taking out the split
lines helped a lot.  

While I have you folks on the line...  

I wonder if there's full documentation somewhere about how one finds out
the options for a d-i preseed variable.  For instance, in my preseed I
have the line:  
d-i  netcfg/choose_interface            select auto
... but actually the network in our classroom is unreliable, and for
truly automatic installation I would prefer to use the "Do not configure
the network atthis time" option.  Should I then replace the above line
with :

d-i  netcfg/choose_interface            select Do not configure the
network at this time
[unwrapped obviously; using evolution here and can't seem to tell it not
to wrap this line...]

If so, is there some way to find out the relevant options in advance
(without just going through an install and noting all the options)

And second, some of the old disks we're installing onto are already
partitioned, and the partition manager stalls on them when attempting
auto-install.  Is there a way to set the (incredibly dangerous) option
of "wipe this Disk and replace with my partitions"?  again, there's
probably some easy way to figure these options out but I don't know
it.  

Thanks again!

matt