Re: Running debian-installer from the command line?
Joachim Durchholz schrieb:
5) I'll be back as soon as I have more results :-)
Hoo-key. After rummaging around in the /sbin/init script, I found that
its main purpose was to set up a few directories, making sure that the
root directory is a freshly installed RAM disk with the contents of the
initrd image, and running the command "/bin/busybox init".
Since my netboot system is already running in an initrd image, I can get
away by setting everything up in /initrd, then chrooting. Here's how I
did it:
-- snip --
# Setup up a growable RAM disk on /tmp
# (the netboot system I'm using has a too-small fixed-size one)
mount -t ramfs nofs /tmp
# Download and mount businesscard ISO image from debian.org
cd /tmp
wget
http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/3.1_r2/i386/iso-cd/debian-31r2-i386-businesscard.iso
mount -o loop /tmp/debian-31r2-i386-businesscard.iso /cdrom
# Extract and mount 2.6 initrd from mounted ISO image
gunzip -c /cdrom/install/2.6/initrd.gz >/tmp/initrd
mount -o loop /tmp/initrd /initrd
# Things are almost correct now,
# we just need to map /proc and /dev over to /initrd:
mount --rbind /proc /initrd/proc
mount --rbind /dev /initrd/dev
# Run "busybox init"
cd /initrd
/usr/sbin/chroot . /bin/busybox init </proc/self/fd/0 >/proc/self/fd/1
2>/proc/self/fd/2
-- snip --
Everything worked fine, except that this darn "/bin/busybox init"
command refused to run. When called from a chroot command, it would say
-- snip --
BusyBox v1.00-pre10 (Debian 20040623-1) multi-call binary
Usage: init
-- snip --
and terminate. (I'm not aware of any usage errors - actually there isn't
much room for that, so this message had me "Huh??".)
----------
An alternate approach would be running the various scripts directly. If
I interpret the /etc/inittab file in the initrd correctly, it's running
first debian-installer-startup, then debian-installer. These scripts run
the files in
/lib/debian-installer-install.d
/etc/rcS.d (which happens to be empty)
/lib/debian-installer.d
I tried that, but ran into lots of error messages.
Actually most of these errors seem harmless - I don't really care if the
frame buffer can't be properly set up when I'm going through SSH :-)
However, there's no indication which of the scripts are there to help
the installer, and which are preparing things for the new system. It's
all a large monolithic blob, and I'd have to spend a *lot* of time
finding out what's relevant for me and what isn't.
----------
Conclusion: It would be nice to use Debian installer, but it's too
difficult to separate the relevant from the irrelevant parts.
I think more work on the Debian installer for this case is needed. I'd
suggest setting up a debian-installer-linux command and associated
script directory, which would carry just those scripts that are relevant
for the install-Debian-from-a-running-Linux case.
This seems like a workable path to me. Unfortunately, it's somewhat
beyond my Debian-installer expertise and way beyond my time budget.
Which means I'm giving up.
I hope this all did/does help somebody even though it's a negative result...
Regards,
Jo
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