One of the many impressive and intuitive features of OSMC for the Raspberry Pi is almost the first thing you’ll see when setting up: the installer, and more specifially the wireless setup part of the installer. For me, it saves me the hassle of temporary using an ethernet connection or a keyboard to get it online.
Doing other experiments with Pi:s I wonde: Could the inner workings of that wireless setup process be replicated for other systems and distros?
It’s nothing that complicated - the installer creates a file on the fat32 partition called preseed.cfg which contains the network settings you enter.
On first boot the python script /usr/bin/preseed runs and reads that file, configuring the network.
However it only works with connman as the network manager and I am not aware of any desktop distros that use connman as their default network manager as it is intended for small embedded devices such as set top boxes and mobile phones/tablets…
Interesting! Thanks for the reply, at least I have a lead for onward research in the matter. 