Chapter 4. Obtaining System Installation Media Once you have a Kickstart file, you can edit it if necessary, and place it on a web, FTP, or NFS server, or copy it onto the installer’s boot media. Wherever you place the file, you need to pass a parameter to the installer at boot time to tell it to use the file. To make the installer use a Kickstart file downloaded from a web or FTP server, add ks=http://url/to/ks.cfg or ks=ftp://url/to/ks.cfg respectively to the kernel boot parameters. This requires the installer to be able to set up the network via DHCP on the first connected interface without asking any questions; you may also need to add ksdevice=eth1 or similar if the installer fails to determine the correct interface automatically. Similarly, to make the installer use a Kickstart file on an NFS server, add ks=nfs:server:/path/to/ks.cfg to the kernel boot parameters. The method supported by Anaconda of adding a plain "ks" boot param- eter to work out the location of the Kickstart file from a DHCP response is not yet supported by the Ubuntu installer. To place a Kickstart file on a CD, you would need to remaster the ISO image to include your Kickstart file, and add ks=cdrom:/path/to/ks.cfg to the kernel boot parameters. See the manual page for mkisofs for details. The Ubuntu installer supports a few extensions to Kickstart that were needed to support automatic installations of Ubuntu: 4.4.2.1. Additions • The rootpw command now takes the --disabled option to disable the root password. If this is used, the initial user will be given root privileges via sudo . • A new user command has been added to control the creation of the initial user: • A new preseed command has been added to provide a convenient way to preseed additional items in the debconf database that are not directly accessible using the ordinary Kickstart syntax: • As of Ubuntu 6.10, the keyboard option takes X layout names. To use an X keyboard variant, set this option to layout_variant , with appropriate values of layout and variant . For example, in_guj selects the Gujarati variant of the Indian layout. user joe --fullname "Joe User" --password iamjoe The --disabled option prevents any non-root users from being created. The --fullname option specifies the user’s full name, as opposed to the Unix username. The --password option supplies the user’s password, by default in the clear (in which case make sure your Kickstart file is kept confidential!); the --iscrypted option may be used to state that the password is already MD5- hashed. preseed --owner gdm shared/default-x-display-manager select gdm Note that if the value contains any special characters, then the value must be quoted, as follows: preseed preseed/late_command string "sed -i ’s/foo/bar/g’ /target/etc/hosts" The --owner option sets the name of the package that owns the question; if omitted, it defaults to d-i, which is generally appropriate for items affecting the first stage of the installer. The three mandatory arguments are the question name, question type, and answer, in that order, just as would be supplied as input to the debconf-set-selections command. 27