Console-setup

With Ubuntu, the keymap, console font etc. are setup by the console-setup package. However, simply adding something like

console-setup console-setup/variant select Germany - Eliminate dead keys
console-setup console-setup/charmap select UTF-8
console-setup console-setup/compose select No compose key
console-setup console-setup/fontsize-text select 16
console-setup console-setup/layout select Germany
console-setup console-setup/altgr select Right Alt
console-setup console-setup/model select Generic 105-key (Intl) PC
console-setup console-setup/codeset select # Latin1 and Latin5 - western Europe and Turkic languages
console-setup console-setup/fontface select VGA

to debconf/CLASS won't work, you will get the defaults (US keyboard layout etc.) instead. Simply running dpkg-reconfigure console-setup will even overwrite your debconf database! The solution is to run a script such as the following:

rm -f $target/etc/default/console-setup
cp $target/usr/share/keymaps/i386/qwertz/de-latin1-nodeadkeys.kmap.gz $target/etc/console/boottime.kmap.gz
$ROOTCMD dpkg-reconfigure console-setup

Once this file is out of the way, dpkg-reconfigure will regenerate it from the values in the debconf database.