Re: Prompting for settings on first boot of a pre-installed image.

[Camaleón <noelamac@gmail.com>]

On Sat, 21 Apr 2012 15:06:30 +0100, peter green wrote:

> Sometimes it is desirable for a system to be shipped in a pre-installed
> form. This may be pre-installed on hardware or it may be in the form of
> an image. In such cases there are a number of questions (language,
> keyboard layout, hostname, network settings, timezone etc) that will be
> known to the end user but will not be known to the person doing the
> installation. There are also certain security settings that should be
> reset under such scenarios.

Mmm... You mean something similiar to what Windows pre-built OEM systems 
do, right? When you first power on your brand-new computer, you get a 
guided wizard that allows the user to input his/her basic data and then 
it finishes the setup and configures the desktop.
 
> The obvious soloution is to set things up so that the user is asked
> these questions when they first boot thier system. I could probablly
> roll my own scripts to do this if I had to but i'm wondering if this is
> an already solved problem and if so whether someone could point me in
> the direction of the soloution.

I don't of any tool to automate this task in linux (it's usually the 
admin who makes this job at install time instead the end user or is the 
user who afterwards configures the system to his/her needs) but it would 
be more than convenient to have such standarized tool at least for 
companies who sell or prepare their own pre-built Debian systems.

I wonder how Canonical, Red Hat or SUSE SLES/SLED (i.e., commercial linux 
distributions) manage this...

Greetings,

-- 
Camaleón