preconfiguring with multistrap
I have a rootfs made with multistrap - it is all very lovely except
for one little wrinkle.
When it is loaded onto the target device and configured I get a
debconf question from tzdata about timezones.
So I looked at ways to get it to not do that and allow a
fully-autoamted install.
Putting random pre-generated files into the rootfs is easy with the
multistrap rootfs-config script, and we do quite a lot of that.
preseeding seemed like a good idea but appears to only be a feature of
debian-installer, not a normal rootfs. So I'm not sure if there is a
way to use that?
dpkg-preconfigure looked interesting but that operates on a .deb
before it is even unpacked, and in a multisatrapped rootfs, we don;t
have the deb and it is already unpacked. Also perl is not configured
so this may not work.
dpkg-reconfigure has the same perl issue and the debconf database is
not initialised either whcih may or may not matter
One way to deal with it is simply set the debconf frontend to
'noninteractive' as we don't actually care what timezone gets set.
However this does not seem to be be a setting in /etc/debconf.conf -
it is a debconf qeustion itself which leads back to the 'how to
pre-set a debconf question' problem.
I see that debconf can use an LDAP database which has all sorts of
interesting possibilities but seems like overkill, and we don't
necessarily have working networking at this point.
The debconf manpages atalk about debconf-set-selections and
debconf-get-selections, but in fact only the former seems to exist,
which is annoying. Can I just put some text into a a pre-generated
/var/cache/debconf/config.dat file with the debconf answers in
question? or is there a less hacky way?
This is likely to be a fairly general problem so I thought it worthy
of discussion.
Wookey
--
Principal hats: iEndian - Balloonboard - Toby Churchill - Emdebian
http://wookware.org/
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