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I have a working preseed file that I cobbled to together manually. Ubuntu 14.04.1 likes this file and will installed in a completely unattended manner. I then took and wrote some C# to write out preseed files based on given parameters. Ubuntu 14.04.1 does NOT like this file. The install always errors with "Syntax Error: unable to determine template type". This happens during the recipe, after the definition of the boot volume.

Here are both files: http://www.filedropper.com/ubuntu-14cfg

I've been banging my head against this for 2 solid days now and do NOT see a difference between the two. Does anyone else see what I'm doing wrong?

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  • Did you try to run diff on the two files? Almost all lines differ in white-space amounts. With diff -uw I still get some differences that appear to be white-space only despite the -w option. Additionally file tells me, that those files have carriage return characters at the end of their lines, which many *nix tools don't like.
    – David Foerster
    May 22, 2015 at 21:03
  • I've tried both with just LF and CR and CRLF, no change. I'd bite on the whitespace thing, but not every line seems to care as there is no consistent whitespace usage.
    – Dan Gentry
    May 26, 2015 at 13:46
  • I don't know what the difference in the partman section was, but after changing up how I defined the partman section in C# from a single-line string with \\\r\n to a literal multi-line string the preseed file was able to be processed successfully.
    – Dan Gentry
    May 26, 2015 at 14:53
  • Ah, there it is. The first "Auto" file used "\ " in the recipe section. Changing this to "\" resolved my issue.
    – Dan Gentry
    May 26, 2015 at 15:04
  • Can you please write an answer with your solution to your own question? Ping me in this comment section, so I can vote for it, if it's a good answer.
    – David Foerster
    May 26, 2015 at 15:35

1 Answer 1

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The problem was that the line continuation characters ("\") had a space after them ("\ ") in the recipe section of my preseed file. This, apparently breaks ALL of the parsers in preseed. Using "\ " in the late_command also results in a failure to parse.

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