Appendix B. Automating the installation using preseeding An example preconfiguration file that you can use as basis for your own preconfiguration file is avail- able from ../example-preseed.txt. This file is based on the configuration fragments included in this appendix. If you are using initrd preseeding, you only have to make sure a file named preseed.cfg is included in the root directory of the initrd. The installer will automatically check if this file is present and load it. For the other preseeding methods you need to tell the installer what file to use when you boot it. This is normally done by passing the kernel a boot parameter, either manually at boot time or by editing the bootloader configuration file If you do specify the preconfiguration file in the bootloader configuration, you might change the configuration so you don’t need to hit enter to boot the installer. For syslinux this means setting the timeout to 1 in syslinux.cfg . To make sure the installer gets the right preconfiguration file, you can optionally specify a checksum for the file. Currently this needs to be a md5sum, and if specified it must match the preconfiguration file or the installer will refuse to use it. Boot parameters to specify: - if you’re netbooting: preseed/url=http://host/path/to/preseed.cfg preseed/url/checksum=5da499872becccfeda2c4872f9171c3d - or preseed/url=ftp://host/path/to/preseed.cfg preseed/url/checksum=5da499872becccfeda2c4872f9171c3d - or preseed/url=tftp://host/path/to/preseed.cfg preseed/url/checksum=5da499872becccfeda2c4872f9171c3d - if you’re booting a remastered CD or image: preseed/file=/cdrom/preseed.cfg preseed/file/checksum=5da499872becccfeda2c4872f9171c3d - if you’re installing from USB media (put the preconfiguration file in the toplevel directory of the USB stick): preseed/file=/hd-media/preseed.cfg preseed/file/checksum=5da499872becccfeda2c4872f9171c3d Note that preseed/url can be shortened to just url , preseed/file to just file and preseed/file/checksum to just preseed-md5 when they are passed as boot parameters. If a preconfiguration file cannot be used to preseed some steps, the install can still be fully automated, since you can pass preseed values on the command line when booting the installer. Boot parameters can also be used if you do not really want to use preseeding, but just want to provide an answer for a specific question. Some examples where this can be useful are documented elsewhere in this manual. B.2.2. Using boot parameters to preseed questions 86 B.2.1. Loading the preconfiguration file