tasksel contains no useful settings

[Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre]

Much like https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu-on-ec2/+bug/352769, previously reported by Eric Hammond.

AMIs used (both display the problem):
# ami-ec527998 - Europe 32bit RC image.
# ami-2132d148 - US 32bit RC image.

On the current RC image, tasksel offers the following options on first boot:

 Choose software to install:
    [*] Basic Ubuntu server
    [*] OpenSSH server
    [*] Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (instance)

As all are selected, simply running 'sudo tasksel --section server' obviously simply returns and does nothing.

While after running apt-get update:

 [*] Basic Ubuntu server
 [ ] Cloud computing cluster
 [ ] Cloud computing node
 [ ] DNS server
 [ ] Edubuntu server
 [ ] LAMP server
 [ ] Mail server
 [*] OpenSSH server
 [ ] PostgreSQL database
 [ ] Print server
 [ ] Samba file server
 [ ] Tomcat Java server
 [*] Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (instance)
 [ ] Virtual Machine host

Either motd has to be updated (as previously suggested), or ec2-init or something else needs to run apt-get update.

[Eric Hammond (esh)]

Confirmed by running ami-2132d148.

Though it would partly solve this particular problem, I recommend against running apt-get update on boot because:

1) The user may want to install a different apt sources list on first boot, say point to the RightScale Ubuntu archive mirror which reflects packages as of a specific historical date which has been QA'd with that user's application. Running apt-get update on the wrong mirror just complicates and slows down the initialization process.

2) Having a startup process run apt-get update makes other startup processes (e.g., apt-get install in a user-data script) have to figure out a way to wait until the apt-get update finishes. This makes life a bit more complicated than just having the user-data script run apt-get update itself.

3) Many startup scripts today already run apt-get update and they will fail if the resources are locked by another process. (I ran into this on previous Canonical AMIs which did apt-get update on boot).

[Eric Hammond (esh)]

To be clear, I do recommend that the motd be updated to give clear instructions.

I also recommend that the motd be reduced significantly in size because what's there scrolls off a reasonable sized terminal, but perhaps that's another bug report.

[Eric Hammond (esh)]

Starting this out at Low importance since it doesn't actually prevent people from getting things done if they know what to do, but it could also be argued that making an EC2 instance easy to use for new users is more important.

I tagged this with ec2-images since I know it applies there. This probably also applies to the uec-something tag but I don't remember what that is and don't use eucalyptus at this point.