Geert Stappers schrieb:
On Fri, May 12, 2006 at 02:54:07PM +0200, Joachim Durchholz wrote:So... what I'm really after is a way to skip all the boot machinery in debian-installer. It should still do everything else (hardware detection, partitioning, base configuration, package installation, and whatever else I forgot to mention).Have you tried to unpack the d-i image in / of the running system, and doing a `telinit -Q` ?
Just a few questions and a progress notice:1) What's the best place to pick the Debian installer images up from? I downloaded the businesscard ISO image, on the grounds that I'm heading for Sarge and want to stick with what's available for Sarge, but I may be wrong with that reasoning.
2) telinit -Q isn't exactly the right way to start things. Or, at least it won't do what you'd expect: there's an /sbin/init in the initrd all right, but it's not a SysV init, it's just a busybox shell wrapper that moves things into the right directories before calling "busybox init" (which I presume is the "right" init that will go through /etc/inittab). I have been toying around with various approaches, but no luck yet - simply running /sbin/init directly failed at the point when it tried to mount /dev (I had though that devfs is dead in 2.6??? ... at least it's not compiled/loaded into the 2.6 kernel that the netboot system is using, grr... um, maybe I accidentally unpacked the 2.4 stuff.)
3) kexec isn't in the netboot kernel I'm stuck with, too, so I may have to live with slight mismatches between installer and kernel... I just hope that Debian installer doesn't depend too much on kernel-specific facilities. (But it seems to be needing devfs, so I have may been too optimistic here...)
4) I'll be trying a few approaches to get the initrd image into the current root, and have the various critical directories (dev, sys, proc) populated correctly. There are far too many options and combinations to try, so this may take me a while.
5) I'll be back as soon as I have more results :-) Regards, Jo