Tom H wrote:
On Thu, Oct 25, 2012 at 8:23 AM, Richard Owlett <rowlett@cloud85.net> wrote:Jon Dowland wrote:On Sun, Oct 21, 2012 at 04:13:17PM -0500, Richard Owlett wrote:It appears to me that my preseed.cfg file is not being read at all.OK. I don't know the nature of the problem you are trying to fix,The nature of the problem is that I have found *NO NONE NADA* complete explicit instructions of what to do when handed THREE objects: 1. dedicated laptop capable of running Debian 2. Debian 6.0.5 DVD 1 of 8 3. a USB stick which may be partitioned and formatted as required on which can be placed a pressed.cfg.You can add "DEBCONF_DEBUG=5" to the kernel's boot options to see (hopefully!) on vt4 why your preseed file isn't being read/loaded.
That's the kind of information I wasn't finding.
What I have found is incomplete and conflicting descriptions of portions of the procedure(s) required drawn from various Debian releases.http://d-i.alioth.debian.org/manual/en.amd64/apbs02.html
I've read that section for older releases, but I wouldn't have looked at that one in detail as I'm still in 32 bit mode. But in a quick read I saw a couple of things I had figured out and found an explicit statement that without setting a specific parameter it would not operate in what I assumed would be its default mode {I need auto=true ;}.
Whilst I agree that the actual preseed "verbs"/"options" aren't fully documented, I don't see what's incomplete or conflicting on the above page.
At the moment all I want is to read a preseed.cfg file. ANY preseed.cfg file ;!
but could it be reproduced/triaged in a virtual machine? It might be much quicker/easier to explore kicking off the installer in a VM, which you can interrupt/throw away and start again very quickly.Based on over 50 years of trouble shooting experience I cannot see the benefit of adding a VM to the mix when the problem is lack of documentation.50 years?!
Snicker. I took my first programming course 8 years before Mr. Torvalds was born. 5U4, 12AX7, 026, CORC and CUPL were part of our vocabulary. I'm so old, I predate BASIC.