Opening the Terminal.app in Setup Assistant of Packer's Tart builder

[gooraje]

Hi, I'm trying to open the Terminal.app during the Setup Assistant while building a new macOS image using Packer's Tart builder. The control sequence that I wish to send is CTL + OPTION + CMD + T, which works if I do it manually. However, when I try to incorporate it into the boot_command as follows:

"<wait10s><leftCtrlOn><leftSuperOn><leftAltOn>t<leftAltOff><leftSuperOff><leftCtrlOff>"

it seems to be ignored. Some keystroke gets registered (audio queue plays) but the Terminal.app does not pop up leading me to believe that the actual registered keystrokes are not what they're supposed to be. I would appreciate if anybody could help me with this conundrum.

[fkorotkov]

Before digging into this, why do you need terminal? Can you just use shell integration that will SSH in and run commands that will be streamed back to your console?

[gooraje]

What I'd like to do is to modify the DNS entries right at the installation start. Since I am building the image inside a corporate network, often behind a VPN it was a quick solution to ensure that networking is properly set up from the get go. From what I've managed to find over at the packer-plugin-sdk repo as well as some general information on how keystrokes are sent over by boot_command it seems that currently this is something that can't be done (at least to my understanding). Either way most likely this would need to be resolved at the packer-plugin-sdk level since sending the Option key currently does not work. Please correct me if I'm wrong in the aforementioned statement.

[fkorotkov]

You can set DNS like this fc12391 but VM should use host DNS by default.

[gooraje]

Yeah, I think I'll need to settle for setting them post-installation.