Automatic (you know, for the people)
I’ve installed Linux, probably 100s of times, and while going through all the questions and answers used to be fun, once you have everything decided it’s mainly a case of tab, space, enter, tab, tab, enter, space, space, tab, enter. I remember reading about kickstart, which was Red Hat‘s way of automating the install process, but Debian GNU/Linux (and by extension Ubuntu Linux) support preseed. From Debian’s wiki, “Preseeding provides a way to set answers to questions asked during the installation process, without having to manually enter the answers while the installation is running. This makes it possible to fully automate most types of installation and even offers some features not available during normal installations.” So preseeding automates the install of the OS, the questions that you’d normally need to answer interactively are predetermined, and defined by a supplied configuration file, and sometimes boot parameters. So while Ubuntu is known for it’s user-friendly OS installer, Ubiquity, preseeding the Debian-Installer (also known as “d-i”) is the recommended method for automating Ubuntu installations and for building custom install CDs. With this in mind I set out to build a preseed config file that would automate installs of virtual KVM machines we were provisioning at a gig, but looking at how I do such bare-bones base installs, this would work for most of my normal Debian installs at home too.
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