For the past few days, I've been working on getting unattended setup and running. It took a while, but I've now got a working installation. I have been using the code straight from cvs, and I've been poking through it to learn how it works so I can modify it to match my own purposes. I have been using virtualbox to test the system with.
I really like the way it's setup, and it seems to work pretty well. I am very poor in my understanding of perl, so it's somewhat difficult to figure out what's happening during certain parts of the install process. I am even more inexperienced with windows, and this makes it more difficult. However, I'm a lot more fluent in python, have years of experience with debian, and I've been doing automated installs of debian machines over a network for many years now. My website for this is here: http://paella.berlios.de/ I have been using debian live for my installer environment, and I'm very pleased with how well it works. I have decided to try using debian live to make the install environment for unattended. I made a rough configuration that seems to work so far. It's somewhat limited, as it only uses the nt5x-install script. The configuration will almost definitely need to be modified to be used, as it's setup to run on my laptop (actually a VM on the laptop, I use paella to create the unattended server and use virtualbox's internal networking to test the system). Some advantages for using debian live is that it supports creating iso's, network images, and even images that can be used on a usb drive (such as an SD card or external hard drive). It's also much quicker to build, and you don't need to keep track of upstream sources. Some disadvantages are that the image is larger, and it requires using debian to make the image. The image that I made with this configuration is around 160M (that's if you use compression with the mksquashfs options, when I'm testing, I don't compress the images and you'll need to edit the "binary" file to comment that out at the bottom to compress the image with the configuration I've attached). I've also attached a script to help install the virtualbox guest additions to the machines I've been trying to install. This is the first script that I made, and it seems to work pretty well. When I add the .reboot directive to it, the installation will fail after rebooting with this error "Unable to GetUNCName for Z::". I think that the todo.pl script is adding an extra colon to the drive letter, but I can't be sure, and I can't understand the perl well enough to diagnose this. I am also using the sample-config.pl and unattended.csv to help with dynamic configuration. I have noticed that there are problems with passing a "0" as the value for a couple of properties. I am going to paste a snippet here to show you: # Lookup fdisk_confirm #$u->push_value ('_meta', 'fdisk_confirm', sub { return lookup_property('FDiskConfirm'); }); $u->push_value ('_meta', 'fdisk_confirm', 0); # Lookup edit_files #$u->push_value ('_meta', 'edit_files', sub { return lookup_property('EditFiles'); }); $u->push_value ('_meta', 'edit_files', 0); The corresponding parts of the unattended.csv follows: "Default","FDiskConfirm","0" "Default","EditFiles","0" These lookups seem to fail and cause the install.pl script to ask the questions anyway. Anyway, this is basically the sum of my experiences so far. I hope to understand how the system works in more detail in the near future. -- Thanks: Joseph Rawson
live-config.exported.tar.gz
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vbox-guest7z.7z
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