No questions, please, we're Cfengine

Over the last two days, in a frenzy of activity, I got some awesome done at work: using git and Vagrant, I finally got Cfengine to install packages in Ubuntu without asking me any goram questions. There were two bits involved:

• Telling Apt to use old config files. This prevents it from asking for confirmation when it comes across your already-installed-with-Cfengine config file. Cfengine doesn't do things in a particular order, and in any case I do package installation once an hour -- so I might well have an NTP config file show up before the NTP package itself.

• Preseeding, which I've known about for a while but have not had a chance to get right. My summer student came up with a script to do this, and I hope to be able to release it.

Now: Fully automated package installation FTMFW.

And did you know that Emacs can check your laptop battery status? I didn't.