Chapter 5. Booting the Installation System cdrom-detect/eject base-installer/install-recommends (recommends) debian-installer/allow_unauthenticated rescue/enable By default, before rebooting, debian-installer automatically ejects the optical media used during the installation. This can be unnecessary if the system does not automatically boot off the CD. In some cases it may even be undesirable, for example if the optical drive cannot reinsert the media itself and the user is not there (since working from remote) to do it manually. Many slot loading, slim-line, and caddy style drives cannot reload media automatically. Set to false to disable automatic ejection, and be aware that you may need to ensure that the system does not automatically boot from the optical drive after the initial installation. By setting this option to false , the package management system will be configured to not automatically install “Recommends”, both during the installation and for the installed system. See also Section 6.3.4. Note that this option allows to have a leaner system, but can also result in features being missing that you might normally expect to be available. You may have to manually install some of the recommended packages to obtain the full functionality you want. This option should therefore only be used by very experienced users. By default the installer requires that repositories be authenticated using a known gpg key. Set to true to disable that authentication. Warning: insecure, not recommended. Set to true to enter rescue mode rather than performing a normal installation. See Section 8.7. With some exceptions, a value can be set at the boot prompt for any question asked during the instal- lation, though this is only really useful in specific cases. General instructions how to do this can be found in Section B.2.2. Some specific examples are listed below. There are two ways to specify the language, country and locale to use for the installation and the installed system. The first and easiest is to pass only the parameter locale . Language and country will then be derived from its value. You can for example use locale=de_CH to select German as language and Switzerland as country ( de_CH.UTF-8 will be set as default locale for the installed system). Limitation is that not all possible combinations of language, country and locale can be achieved this way. The second, more flexible option is to specify language and country separately. In this case locale can optionally be added to specify a specific default locale for the installed system. Example: language=en country=DE locale=en_GB.UTF-8 . debian-installer/language (language) debian-installer/country (country) debian-installer/locale (locale) 38 5.3.3. Using boot parameters to answer questions