Re: speeding up installs
On Sat, Jun 08, 2019 at 07:45:50PM +0200, Jonathan Carter wrote:
> It might be useful to some that we'll have a 'standard' image for Debian
> Live Buster. This is a base image with Debian standard that doesn't
> contain any desktop environment. It ships with d-i with a module that
> just unsquashes the squashfs image (just like the other live images), so
> it's a really quick and convenient way to get a Debian system installed
> on bare metal.
I like this. The d-i is nothing but a glorified live image already. On
every not completely non-eventful install I find myself wishing this live
system wasn't crippled for space reasons. This crippling was intentional --
d-i was designed in the days of boot floppies when a couple of megabytes was
a lot -- but today, no one gives a damn about ten or fifty megs extra to
have a real shell, less, man pages and what not.
So if you took current d-i and planted it into a regular live image, that'd
be great. It probably has too much functionality to be easily rewriteable,
but changing the base system under it sounds like a good idea.
On the other hand, do we have a list of what d-i can do that Calamares or
whatever you are using, can't?
Another improvement would be to kill that squashfs and replace it with a
regular minimized filesystem that expands to the whole USB stick (CDs are
long long gone). This would avoid redownloading the same .debs if you
install from the same stick again, yet not download .debs you don't want
even once. And it'd get us an user-friendly way of generating preseeds:
you install manually once, then use saved settings. And heck, a CD would
simply not cache downloads.
Meow!
--
⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀
⣾⠁⢰⠒⠀⣿⡁
⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋⠀ At least spammers get it right: "Hello beautiful!".
⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀
Reply to: