It recently clicked in my head that all the blades with small swap partitions were because they had their OS installed when they had very little RAM in them. So I set out to modify the Ubuntu 8.10 preseed install to create a larger swap partition and configure LVM while we were at it.

This proved difficult. Mostly because the better documentation of debian-installer (preseed, partman-auto) has features that aren’t in the version in Ubuntu.

Just got this working:

d-i partman-auto/disk string /dev/sda
d-i partman-auto/method string lvm
d-i partman-lvm/device_remove_lvm boolean true 
d-i partman-lvm/device_remove_lvm_span boolean true
d-i partman-auto/purge_lvm_from_device  boolean true
d-i partman-auto-lvm/new_vg_name string system
#d-i partman-auto/init_automatically_partition \
#  select Guided - use entire disk and set up LVM
d-i partman-auto/expert_recipe string                         \
      boot-root ::                                            \
              40 300 300 ext3                                 \
                      $primary{ }                             \
                      $bootable{ }                            \
                      method{ format } format{ }              \
                      use_filesystem{ } filesystem{ ext3 }    \
                      mountpoint{ /boot }                     \
              .                                               \
              2000 10000 1000000000 ext3                      \
                      $lvmok{ }                               \
                      method{ format } format{ }              \
                      use_filesystem{ } filesystem{ ext3 }    \
                      mountpoint{ / }                         \
              .                                               \
              8000 8000 200% linux-swap                       \
                      $lvmok{ }                               \
                      method{ swap } format{ }                \
              .

d-i partman-lvm/confirm boolean true
d-i partman/confirm_write_new_label boolean true
d-i partman/choose_partition select Finish partitioning and write changes to disk
d-i partman/confirm boolean true