General options include all the settings related to the installation process and the environment of the installed system. Among others it includes the following 4 properties which are required: language, keyboard, clock and mouse almost for any installation. If left out, default values will be used, which might not be in one hand with what you want.

  

    <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>
      </signature-handling>
      <mode>
      <halt config:type="boolean">false</halt>
	<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.

	Change starting from SUSE Linux 9.1/SLES 9
	The reboot property in the mode resource was used to force a reboot after initial system setup and before the system is booted for the first time. Currently after initial installation all systems must boot, which makes this option obsolete.

	SLES9 Only Options
	In SLES 9, it is possible to halt the system after the initial installation phase using the boolean property halt

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). For the signature-handling, please read the Software chapter of this documentation.