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debian-preseed

This directory contains a preseed.cfg file, which is an example of how to use Debian Preseed.

It has been developed starting from the official Preseed example for Debian Bookworm (SHA256 checksum: 7d634dd7f1ec07ee4e189963d824860b648de6d0e126dd730cbfbe265dcdabcc).

Usage

Note: in this guide, we assume that you have two machines: a control host (e.g. your PC) and a remote host (e.g. a physical server) on which you want to install Debian using Preseed.

Customize the preseed.cfg file and place it into some directory on your control host (e.g. my-preseed-dir) as the only file, as we're gonna serve that directory over HTTP in a while.

In particular, pay attention to the following:

  • d-i netcfg/get_hostname string ...
  • d-i netcfg/hostname string ...
  • d-i partman-auto/disk string ...
  • the d-i preseed/late_command block at the bottom, which is just an example of what can be done

Download a Debian installation image (e.g. debian-12.0.0-amd64-netinst.iso) from https://www.debian.org/ and flash it onto a USB pendrive. To do that you can use Rufus.

Insert the USB stick into the remote host, power it on and boot from the pendrive.

In the Debian installation image boot screen, you can select Advanced options → Automated install from the menu to perform the OS setup using a Debian Preseed file.

One of the easiest ways to serve the Preseed file is to use an HTTP server on your control host. To do this with Python3 you can do something like this:

Bash
1
python3 -mhttp.server -dmy-preseed-dir -b0.0.0.0

Once the installation procedure is finished, the device will shut down on its own (it won't restart) due to the d-i debian-installer/exit/poweroff boolean true line.

If needed, turn on the device again and change the main user's password immediately (you can use the passwd command).

Notes