preseeded installation hangs
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
pkgsel (Ubuntu) |
Confirmed
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned |
Bug Description
hi colin et al,
i've been attempting to use a customized install via preseeding the installer questions. however, the installer will hang semi-reliably
during "select and install software", with no recourse but to kill
some offending processes.
when this happens, poking around inevitably shows the same problem. there's a defunct aptitude process, along with a bunch of other cruft which leads back up to pkgsel.
iirc, along with the defunct process, there was an apt cdrom method process running as a child of the same parent process, and killing this would cause the parent to reap them both in and the installer would continue (with the big red screen etc). i'm re-running it right now and i'll try and post some specifics shortly.
this can be semi-regularly reproduced, though sometimes it does seem to go through if i make an unrelated change and rebuild the iso, only to break a build or two later...
about my customizations: i haven't really done much at all except
specify some values to skip most of the questions except disk partitioning, which is still manually done. it also uses the oem package. afterwards, there's a custom script that runs and installs a bunch of stuff and deactivates the oem mode, so that after first reboot the user is immediately prompted with the username/login questions.
so i'm not sure if this is genuinely a problem in pkgsel, or whether it's d-i, apt, dpkg, debconf, etc, but it's the first thing i can tie it to and i'm running with it from there.
okay, just got it to happen again. i'm going to attach a few files:
- tail /var/log/syslog outside of chroot (nothing interesting)
- ps x (shows the zombie process)
- the preseed settings (in case they're worth anything)
and in case it's helpful, the isolinux config setting used to boot the installer is:
kernel /install/vmlinuz file=/cdrom/ preseed/ stickybit. seed anna/choose_ modules= oem-config- udeb kbd-chooser/ method= se-latin1 debian- installer/ locale= en_US initrd= /install/ initrd. gz ramdisk_size=16384 root=/dev/ram rw --
append preseed/