Help with a touchless, netbooted, preseeded installation of squeeze on lots of plugs
Hi all,
I am trying to do something relatively advanced with the
debian-installer netboot and preseed. I have been charged with the
commissioning of a large number of Dreamplug armel machines with a
Debian squeeze installation and I am attempting to get a completely
touchless netboot install setup. I have achieved this to a large degree
but there are a few pesky key presses that I can't seem to preseed away.
This project, on the face of it should be simple, but the specifics of
the Dreamplug hardware have caused some problems for me:
- Stock Debian stable kernels do not work on this hardware. I have been
forced to patch, build and package my own kernel. My kernels work but I
can't install them via the normal preseed kernel selection for the
following reasons...
- The Dreamplug uboot bootloader needs a uImage installed into a special
vfat partition on its internal SD card, with the rest of the OS
installing to other partitions on the SD card.
- Debian's kernel package system does not seem to support building and
packaging uImages.
- The d-i will not allow /boot to be vfat anyway so my special vfat
partition needs to be mounted as something else (I chose /uboot).
To get around all of the above, I have created a rather simple kernel
package that just installs my custom uImage into /uboot and this is
"apt-get installed" from my own repo in my late_command (to allow me to
ignore the fact that my package is unverified).
This all works but for the following error that pops up at the end of
the installation:
┌─────────────────┤ [!!] Make the system bootable ├─────────────────┐
│ │
│ Installation step failed │
│ An installation step failed. You can try to run the failing item │
│ again from the menu, or skip it and choose something else. The │
│ failing step is: Make the system bootable │
│ │
│ <Continue> │
│ │
└───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
... and syslog reports:
May 16 16:16:33 in-target: Setting up uboot-mkimage (0.4) ...
May 16 16:16:34 in-target: Cannot find a default kernel in /vmlinuz or
/boot/vmlinuz
May 16 16:16:34 flash-kernel-installer: error: flash-kernel failed
May 16 16:16:34 main-menu[805]: WARNING **: Configuring
'flash-kernel-installer' failed with error code 1
May 16 16:16:34 main-menu[805]: WARNING **: Menu item
'flash-kernel-installer' failed.
These errors are from the pre-built debian-installer from squeeze. I
have also tried building the the one from svn but this fails due to
uboot-mkimage changing to u-boot-tools and hence not being available in
squeeze.
Once I have navigated through the error and selected "Continue with no
boot loader" from the menu, the installation finishes without any
further issues and the installed system boots fine.
A colleague and someone on the IRC suggested trying the nobootloader
package so I put an "anna-install nobootloader" line in my early_command
but aside from syslog reporting that it is queued and then retrieved, it
doesn't make the problem go away.
So ... my question is - does anyone have an easy way to do one of the
following:
a) Prevent the whole bootloader and kernel installation parts of the
installer from running and just go straight onto running late_command
and reboot.
b) Turn off that *** warning and get the installer to just fail quietly
then continue into late_command and reboot.
I realise I am well out of documented preseed territory here and any
solutions may require me to modify d-i source and build my own installer
- this is fine. I just thought I would ask the developers before I
dived into trying to hack this myself.
Many thanks in advance,
Dan Tomlinson
PS: I may have to commission hundreds of these plugs so I really is
worth my while to get this installation completely automated!
--
Senior Systems Administrator
NSMS (Network Systems Management Service)
Oxford University Computing Services
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