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Denny Crane
Asked: 2015-04-13 21:55:08 +0800 CST

Debian preseed.cfg - Language not set

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I'm trying to write a preseed.cfg which should be used for a full automated installation of Debian wheezy. For some reasons the installer is still asking to select a lanugage even if I set this in my preseed.cfg.

I got these options from the official Debian page: https://www.debian.org/releases/wheezy/example-preseed.txt

# Preseeding only locale sets language, country and locale.
d-i debian-installer/language string en
d-i debian-installer/country string DE
d-i debian-installer/locale string en_US.UTF-8
# Optionally specify additional locales to be generated.
d-i localechooser/supported-locales multiselect de_DE.UTF-8
debian

7 Answers

  1. Setting localization values will only work if you are using initrd preseeding. With all other methods the preseed file will only be loaded after these questions have been asked.

    To get this working there are two options:

    1. Setting localization as kernel parameters
    2. Building a custom netinstall iso with a preseeding.cfg
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  2. If you use build-simple-cdd then the parameters to skip language and keyboard questions are:

    build-simple-cdd --keyboard us --locale en_US.UTF-8

    The reason for that is that the pressed is loaded after setting these, just like @denny-crane said.

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  3. As far as I can see your preseed settings are correct.

    Did you set priority=critical in the boot parameter? That will prevent the installer from asking any questions, except critical ones.

    Also did you try to set console-setup/layoutcode=us in the boot parameter? I remember that would get rid of the last question about the keymap, it may help in your case.

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  4. Does your installer ask for the keyboard language?

    We use the following language-related definitions in our preseed file, and the (standard PXEbooted) installer doesn't ask us anything about language.

    # Locale, country and keyboard settings
d-i debian-installer/locale string en_US
d-i console-setup/ask_detect boolean false
d-i console-setup/modelcode string pc105
d-i console-setup/variant USA
d-i console-setup/layout USA
d-i console-setup/layoutcode string us
# for Debian 7 and later
d-i keymap select us
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  5. When booting on the Ubuntu Installation device (CD or USB disk), the syslinux bootloader asks first for a language, before displaying the boot menu (that would eventually run a preseed file).

    In order to select automatically a language, you should

    1. Set the chosen language in the syslinux/langlist file by removing the other languages.
    2. Set a non-null timeout in the syslinux/syslinux.cfg file, expressed in deci-seconds.
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  6. Just figured out this one. The answer is the order is important. Put locale first then language. Change this

    d-i debian-installer/language string en
d-i debian-installer/country string DE
d-i debian-installer/locale string en_US.UTF-8

    into this

    d-i debian-installer/locale string en_US.UTF-8
d-i debian-installer/language string en
d-i debian-installer/country string DE
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  7. In Ubuntu Server 14.04 I was able to get past the language selection list by creating a file named "lang" with one line "en" (for selecting English) in isolinux directory.

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