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The Ubuntu installer supports a few extensions to Kickstart that were needed to support automatic installations of Ubuntu:
• 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:
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.
• 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:
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.
• 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.
• You may use the apt-install command to install packages in %post --nochroot scripts (although you might also choose to generate a %packages section in a %pre script and include it using
%include). Note that this does not work if the post-installation script is run in the chroot environ- ment.
4.4.2.2. Missing features