d-i: what is it doing?

[carlyoung@keycomm.co.uk]

Hi all,

My apologies if this has been answered before, but I couldn't find a definitive answer in the archives.

I am PXE installing Ubuntu 10.04 to a VMware guest, which uses the Debian installer. The install will run to termination, but there is a strange 'pause' in the middle. This pause seems to last for approximately 8 minutes, where the virtual CPU is running at 100% looking at the performance, but nothing is displayed on the text installer UI.

The F4 console shows "net-retriever: Good signature from "Ubuntu Archive Automatic Signing Key <ftpmaster@ubuntu.com>"

Having just written this mail - I am now guessing that the installer is now verifiying signatures or something, but it hasn't really downloaded too much by this point so I would have hoped it wouldn't take 8 minutes. Is there something more than DEBCONF_DEBUG=5 that I can use to see what is happening and if I can ameliorate the "delay" in any way. I have tried adding virtual CPUs and additional to see if that helps in any way, but apparently it doesn't. The local disk has not been mounted so I can't see anything being written to that.

While I'm asking - is there any way to access the preseed file from a local [hard] disk? I currently have the kernel and initial ramdisk on a local partition and bootloaded by syslinux, but I am reading the preseed from an HTTP server. I would like to able to read it from the local hard disk, but I have no idea how to (if it is possible at all). I guess I could always expand and rebuild the initrd if necessary!?

Thanks for any advice anyone can give me,

Regards,

Carl