Jun,
Right now the non-interactive installer just does what the interactive one does -- that is, it installs only the packages tagged as being part of the core. That's what it was supposed to do in ACS4, and I pretty much just ported it to OpenACS4 and stopped there.
Like you, I want to be able to install some more packages than that "out of the box", so I'll probably extend it to be able to install a set of additional packages too. Stay tuned. That's taking a back seat right now to minor non-porting stuff I'm doing to try and help with the first ever OpenACS 4 (pre-)alpha release. But it is definitely something I plan to do a bit later on.
Once Don commits my changes to auto-install.tcl, if you or anyone else want to try it out and tell me whether it works as well for you as it does for me, that would be useful. All you do is point your browser to http://yourhostname/auto-install when you first bring things up... that sets a somewhat useless set of default info for the system, but you can change that with a set of parameters to the script to suit your needs.
Funny about unchecking the boxes... I have a little installer script that would rm -rf the packages I was not interested in, so they don't show up at all in the APM 😊 That way I can do "my" install by *leaving* the boxes checked!
