General options include all the settings related to the installation process and the environment of the installed system.

  

    <general>
      <signature-handling>
        <accept_unsigned_file         config:type="boolean">true</accept_unsigned_file>
        <accept_file_without_checksum config:type="boolean">true</accept_file_without_checksum>
        <accept_verification_failed   config:type="boolean">true</accept_verification_failed>
        <accept_unknown_gpg_key       config:type="boolean">true</accept_unknown_gpg_key>
        <import_gpg_key               config:type="boolean">true</import_gpg_key>
        <accept_non_trusted_gpg_key   config:type="boolean">true</accept_non_trusted_gpg_key>
      </signature-handling>
      <mode>
        <halt config:type="boolean">false</halt>
        <forceboot config:type="boolean">false</forceboot>     <! -- since 11.0 -->
        <final_reboot config:type="boolean">false</final_reboot>   <! -- since 11.0 -->
        <final_halt config:type="boolean">false</final_halt>       <! -- since 11.0 -->
        <confirm config:type="boolean">true</confirm>
        <second_stage config:type="boolean">true<second_stage>
      </mode>
    </general>


	  
	

By default, the auto-installation process has to be confirmed by the user. The confirmation should be disabled if a fully unattended installation is desired. This option is used to view and change the settings on a target system before anything is committed and can be used for debugging. It is set to true by default to avoid recursive installs when the system schedules a reboot after initial system setup.

With halt you make autoyast to turn off the machine after all packages have been installed. So instead of the reboot into stage two, the machine is turned off. The bootloader is alreay installed and all your chroot scripts have run.

final_halt and final_reboot are new with openSUSE 11.0 and SLES11. You can reboot or halt the machine, when everything with installation and configuration is done, with that.

openSUSE 11.0 uses the kexec feature and does not reboot anymore between stage1 and stage2. With the forceboot option you can force the reboot in case you need it for some reason. true will reboot, false will not reboot and a missing forceboot option uses the products default.

Change starting from SUSE Linux 10.1/SLES10

The language, keyboard and clock properties in the general resource were moved to the root (profile) element of the autoyast profile. So don't use them in the general section anymore. Since now you can use the second_stage property, which can turn off autoyast after the first reboot. So the complete second stage is a manual installation (default is true, which means that autoyast is doing a complete installation). Since openSUSE 11.0 you can set the boolean final_reboot and final_halt to reboot/turn off the machine at the end of stage two. For the signature-handling, please read the Software chapter of this documentation.