[08:56] <smartboyhw> cjwatson, are you off today? I might propose another change......
[09:28] <cjwatson> smartboyhw: feel free to propose it, but it's Saturday, I'm sure pestering me about it can wait until it isn't the weekend?
[15:23] <smartboyhw> cjwatson or others: Please pay sometime to look into https://code.launchpad.net/~smartboyhw/wubi/bug-1080090/+merge/134776
[22:32] <ynniv> Does anyone have a working preseed for a distro served by old-releases.ubuntu.com?
[22:32] <ynniv> I am trying to preseed ubuntu 7.10, but debconf seems to ignore "choose-mirror-bin mirror/http/hostname string old-releases.ubuntu.com"
[22:51] <cjwatson> ynniv: "choose-mirror-bin" should be "d-i" there, but that error wouldn't break installation, just leave some cruft on the installed system
[22:51] <cjwatson> ynniv: two possible things you might have done wrong:
[22:52] <cjwatson> ynniv: 1) you might be missing "d-i mirror/country string enter information manually" (it's "manual" in >=8.04, but 7.10 required the cumbersome "enter information manually")
[22:54] <cjwatson> ynniv: 2) I was going to have another possibility here but I've realised it's a non-issue :)
[22:54] <ynniv> hah. ok, does https://gist.github.com/4101032 look like an appropriate chunk of preseed?
[22:57] <cjwatson> seems roughly plausible
[22:57] <cjwatson> if it still doesn't work, extract and post the syslog after an installation attempt with the DEBCONF_DEBUG=developer boot parameter
[23:00] <ynniv> I'll give it a whirl. That was extremely helpful, thank you.
[23:00] <cjwatson> you're welcome
[23:19] <bg> Afternoon, folks. I'm trying to track down anything related to the build process for the netboot kernel and initrd. Anyone know if its documented anywhere?
[23:20] <cjwatson> bg: It's all in the debian-installer source package
[23:20] <cjwatson> Note that the kernel is just the regular kernel
[23:21] <cjwatson> Building the debian-installer source package in the standard way produces a variety of installer images including the netboot ones
[23:21] <bg> Awesome, thanks for the lead.
[23:22] <cjwatson> You can type 'make' in the build/ subdirectory therein to be offered a list of make targets that build single images rather than the whole lot (which takes a while)
[23:22] <bg> I'm knee deep in trying to make network installs work with 12.04 on UEFI hardware. It is a very dark place.
[23:23] <cjwatson> Yeah, there's little prospect of that yet.
[23:23] <cjwatson> It's not even clear that it works on 12.10; Steve tells me that he ran into some as-yet-undiagnosed bug in GRUB's tftp driver when he tried.
[23:24] <bg> I've got a flimsy setup that should work for our very limited deployment need, but it is not pretty.
[23:25] <cjwatson> What boot loader are you using - or are you launching the kernel directly somehow?
[23:26] <bg> UEFI grabs iPXE over TFTP (for fancy menus, other OSes, etc). iPXE downloads a grub binary with an embedded kernel+initrd.
[23:27] <bg> Using the casper vmlinuz and initrd gets me into a pretty functional state with console, but the netinst bits don't include the i915 driver, and vesafb doesn't work under UEFI
[23:29] <cjwatson> Right, so you don't have to rely on GRUB's networking drivers, which in any case weren't anything like sufficient in 12.04
[23:30] <bg> Even in upstream, the efinet http and tftp stuff exhibits mysterious hangs when attempting to download a kernel/initrd
[23:30] <cjwatson> Indeed, that was the bug I was alluding to above
[23:30] <cjwatson> Perhaps try efifb rather than the i915 driver?  It's simpler
[23:32] <bg> That's one of the things I'd like to try, but it's missing from the casper initrd so it brought me to the same conclusion: I need to build my own.
[23:32] <bg> (and that's underway! thanks again for the tip)
[23:32] <cjwatson> Yeah, though if you want netboot then surely you don't mean the casper initrd long-term?
[23:32] <cjwatson> Unless you're netbooting the live image in which case the information above is inaccurate
[23:32] <bg> I was only toying with the casper bits because I knew they worked when installing from USB
[23:33] <cjwatson> OK
[23:33] <cjwatson> To be clear, debian-installer builds the images in http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/precise/main/installer-amd64/current/images/netboot/
[23:33] <cjwatson> (among others)
[23:35] <bg> right, which is exactly the stuff we're using for vanilla PXE deployment
[23:35] <bg> this EFI twist has been a big hurdle.
[23:36] <cjwatson> Tell me about it
[23:36] <bg> I'm curious to see how the quantal backport kernel could make things even more complicated! e.g. in 6 months when another round of new hardware shows up that requires 3.5, we'll somehow need to use the backport kernel to install 12.04.
[23:37] <cjwatson> Actually the next debian-installer image set in precise will include images built using the quantal kernel
[23:37] <cjwatson> As an option
[23:37] <bg> Oh, that's good to hear
[23:37] <cjwatson> It's needed for all the secure boot stuff
[23:38] <bg> I'm plugging my ears on that topic. Things are complicated enough without introducing signing at this point.
[23:38] <cjwatson> Yeah, don't introduce it if you don't have to
[23:39] <cjwatson> Unfortunately I only got to plug my ears for just so long
[23:39] <bg> Has the signing infra been a nightmare?
[23:39] <cjwatson> Moderately
[23:41] <cjwatson> And of course new and exciting firmware bugs
[23:44] <bg> re: your comment before about the netboot kernel being standard, does it just reuse the -generic .config?
[23:45] <cjwatson> It literally copies the kernel
[23:45] <cjwatson> No point in us rebuilding it for the installer images
[23:46] <cjwatson> And yeah, for amd64 it's the -generic kernel
[23:46] <bg> works for me!
[23:46] <cjwatson> You might possibly find http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/Modify/CustomKernel helpful, though you'll need to substitute heavily for Ubuntu differences
[23:47] <cjwatson> Hopefully you don't actually need to rebuild the kernel and you can skip all that and the localudebs bits
[23:47] <cjwatson> Well, providing that the kernel udebs include the modules you need
[23:47] <cjwatson> If not then you'll have to glue that in
[23:48] <cjwatson> In extremis there are various tricks in the d-i build system for adding individual files - see e.g. build/README
[23:49] <cjwatson> For a one-off that may be rather quicker
[23:49] <cjwatson> Anyway, must go ...
[23:49] <bg> Thanks so much for the help
[23:49] <cjwatson> Good luck :-)
[23:49] <bg> Frankly, given how much cjwatson@ I see on bugs/lists, you're a machine.
[23:49] <bg> I'd be lying if I said I hadn't poked in here looking for you specifically.
[23:52] <cjwatson> Heh, s/machine/insomniac/ ...
[23:53] <infinity> cjwatson: There's a difference?
[23:54] <cjwatson> You can switch machines off
[23:54] <infinity> I find a frying pan to the head can work wonders.