Appendix B. Automating the installation using preseeding The same effect can be achieved for all questions by setting the parameter preseed/interactive=true at the boot prompt. This can also be useful for testing or debugging your preconfiguration file. Note that the “d-i” owner should only be used for variables used in the installer itself. For variables belonging to packages installed on the target system, you should use the name of that package instead. See the footnote to Section B.2.2. If you are preseeding using boot parameters, you can make the installer ask the corresponding question by using the “?=” operator, i.e. foo / bar ?= value (or owner : foo/bar ?= value ). This will of course only have effect for parameters that correspond to questions that are actually displayed during an installation and not for “internal” parameters. For more debugging information, use the boot parameter DEBCONF_DEBUG=5 . This will cause debconf to print much more detail about the current settings of each variable and about its progress through each package’s installation scripts. It is possible to include other preconfiguration files from a preconfiguration file. Any settings in those files will override pre-existing settings from files loaded earlier. This makes it possible to put, for example, general networking settings for your location in one file and more specific settings for certain configurations in other files. It is also possible to chainload from the initrd or file preseeding phase, into network preseeding by setting preseed/url in the earlier files. This will cause network preseeding to be performed when the network comes up. You need to be careful when doing this, since there will be two distinct runs at preseeding, meaning for example that you get another chance to run the preseed/early command, the second one happening after the network comes up. B.5.3. Chainloading preconfiguration files # More than one file can be listed, separated by spaces; all will be # loaded. The included files can have preseed/include directives of their # own as well. Note that if the filenames are relative, they are taken from # the same directory as the preconfiguration file that includes them. #d-i preseed/include string x.cfg # The installer can optionally verify checksums of preconfiguration files # before using them. Currently only md5sums are supported, list the md5sums # in the same order as the list of files to include. #d-i preseed/include/checksum string 5da499872becccfeda2c4872f9171c3d # Most flexibly of all, this downloads a program and runs it. The program # can use commands such as debconf-set to manipulate the debconf database. # More than one script can be listed, separated by spaces. # Note that if the filenames are relative, they are taken from the same # directory as the preconfiguration file that runs them. #d-i preseed/run string foo.sh # More flexibly, this runs a shell command and if it outputs the names of # preconfiguration files, includes those files. #d-i preseed/include_command \ # string if [ "‘hostname‘" = bob ]; then echo bob.cfg; fi 104