Automatic install: Pre-seeding variables for language and country

[Christian Perrier <bubulle@debian.org>]

Yesterday, Raphael Hertzog asked me whether it could be possible to
preseed the values for language and country in order to automate the
beginning of the installation process.

I did some rough tests and it finally appeared that, yes, this is
easily possible.

The trick is of course feeding the correct debconf variables:

At the boot prompt (Raphael tested with a hacked syslinux.cfg file but
for some unknown reason this failed):


linux (or linux26) languagechooser/language-name=French
countrychooser/country-name-shortlist=France
countrychooser/country-name=France

(on one line of course)

will skip language and country choosers, setting the locale to fr_FR
and continue up to kbd-chooser....

This method, combined the the use of the preseed package, could allow
for FAI (fully automated installations). I didn't tried to understand
preseed yet, but as the methods are file and URL, it needs that really
early stages such as language and country selection are achived to
order to have access to the needed modules and steps for accessing the
preseed file itself.

So, this trck could be helpful some day....

You need to feed *both* countrychooser values even if the country is
in the short list. This is probably because some wrong design of
countrychooser (which I won't change in this release time...)


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