Thanks for your reply, Ben.
That was my thought too. But I could ping
www.google.com from both a normal terminal and from inside a "chroot /live/installer /bin/sh" (after I 'cp /bin/ping /live/installer/bin/') There doesn't seem to be any network problems that I can find.
Now that I've discovered that /live/installer is where its all going on, (and I have my familiar /target mount), I could make headway. It turns out that once inside /live/installer, /usr/bin/apt-setup eventually gets called. It in turn calls /usr/lib/apt-setup/generators/50mirror which does this, which fails:
db_metaget apt-setup/use/netinst description
That causes 50mirror to fail and exit with $? = 10 because of set -e. apt-setup "handles" that, but eventually also exits with exitcode 10. That is why I'm seeing the problem. If I change that exit to exit 0, it continues. I didn't manage to fiddle enough with debconf to get it to actually configure the mirror.
So my question is now reduced to: Why does "db_metaget apt-setup/use/netinst description" fail? Shouldn't the apt-setup package have "populated" debconf with that info? (I'm not incredibly strong on debconf...)
When I run this script:
#!/bin/sh
set -e
. /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
logger -t debug before get
db_metaget apt-setup/use/netinst description
logger -t debug after get
I get the "after get" line in /var/log/syslog when i run it in the text installer boot option from the same ISO (that works), but I don't get it when I run the installer from inside the live image.
So something is funky with the debconf database, but only when the installer is run from inside the live image. Is that a valid assessment? Any idea what should be done about it?