Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Evan Dandrea]

On Mon Oct 11 21:34:08 UTC 2010 Lars Seipel wrote:
> It may be nice usability-wise but it lacks support for LVM2, LUKS disk
> encryption and practically everything more advanced. It can't be automated
> using some equivalent to kickstart and it fails at all the stuff Anaconda
> subsumes unter "advanced storage devices". You can't even do the install from
> some remote place without setting anything up by hand. Ubuntu users requiring
> more than these very basic features have to go for the Debian text mode
> installer Ubuntu ships on their alternate media.

You absolutely can automate it, using the same preseeding mechanism found in
debian-installer.  See the following wiki page for the differences between
preseeding ubiquity and preseeding the alternate CD:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbiquityAutomation

And the following guide on preseeding, if you are unfamiliar with that:

https://help.ubuntu.com/10.04/installation-guide/i386/appendix-preseed.html

Note that you can use a subset of kickstart with the Ubuntu alternate CD
(debian-installer) via kickseed.  It's technically possible and relatively easy
to include this translation in ubiquity, but it has never been implemented.

As for being able to do the install remotely, I do installs over PXE and NFS
using the Ubuntu live CD all the time.