Al Puzzuoli wrote:
Hi all,
I realize that at present there is no formal accessible install process
for Ubuntu, but I've been trying for some time to work out a way to get
around this fact. It would seem logical that there should be a way to
do a completely hands free, unattended install. I've been playing with
preseed and kickstart, but I'm coming to the conclusion that by the
time I figure out whether I can actually fully automate the process, I
could have already gotten sighted assistance to do installs on 10 or
more systems, grin. The main issue I'm having is that the installer
always seems to stop at some point or another, typically at the
partitioning screen, even though I explicitly tell it not to do so in
my preseed and ks.cfg files.
Failing that, I was hoping to find a way to boot the install cd, and
then telnet or ssh in from another machine. Is it even possible to do
so with the Debian installer? If not, then I strongly feel that
implementing such a feature would benefit remote administrators at
large, as well as offer an accessible solution.
After years of being a RedHat die hard, I'm seriously considering making
the switch to Ubuntu; However, the apparent lack of any way whatsoever
to do an independent install is probably one of the biggest cons in my book.
Hello Al!
We have been thinking about how to facilitate an independent install for
some time. It's clearly an important part of the puzzle and your case
proves it.
In dapper the main focus will be on the Live CD, which boots directly
into a Gnome session. Most people will be installing via that route. As
a result we have also focused our efforts on that platform in the
accessibility team.
There are still a few pieces missing (ugh!) but the idea is that you
will be able to press a few keys at the very start of the boot process
and from there you will have a fully accessible system that reads the
screen output to you. At the gfxboot screen you press F5 for the access
menu and then '3' for the screen reader and Enter to boot.
I'd be interested to know how this would work for you as a system
administrator, trying to install quickly on many machines. The idea is
to run the whole install process in Gnome with a tool called Espresso.
You can ssh into a live session, but I'm not sure Espresso can be run
from the command line or be scripted (that would be good).
- Henrik
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