Re: [Question] Integrating the debian installer in live-build - DVD, multi-arch, custom, etc.

[jnqnfe@gmail.com]

Okay, but still, it's going to be a significant task to hack things
about sufficiently to achieve your goal, and you'll largely be on your
own in doing it, since it's not going to be worth the time of others
such as myself to assist with it I'm afraid. Even if you do achieve it,
I would not expect this to be of interest to merge into the official
live-build, and so then you've got the problem of time needed to
maintain it, rebasing it now and then upon new work going into live-
build if you want to be able to re-use your hack in future. I would
still not suggest that proceeding with this plan is a good idea.

To clarify, in answer to your previous query about whether live-build
supports integrating a hacked together multi-arch d-i, the answer is
no. Your plan will require some degree of hacking live-build itself.
It's a messy task, requiring learningto some degree how the live-build
codebase works, and is not helped by issues in the live-build codebase
such as `LB_ARCHITECTURES` confusingly being plural when it actually
just carries a single architecture.

I take your point that pen drives are more expensive that DVDs, but do
consider the value of your time in working on this. The value of the
time spent on it is probably going to easily dwarf that of the cost of
a second pen drive. Also, do you really still have any systems that are
only i386 that you actually need an i386 installer for? My mother's PC
is pretty damn old now and still that's amd64.

Something that might interest you is that you do not actually have to
"burn" the disc image directly to the storage medium to be able to use
it, there is an alternate setup possible such as that of rEFInd (or
whatever it was called) that someone else brought up in a separate
discussion here in the debian-live mailing list the other day/week,
whereby multiple such images can exist in a medium as individual
partitions, with an EFI bootloader that lets you select which one to
load. However, (1) it is EFI based, and so unless there's one that
works for BIOS it's likely not going to work for you, and (2)
unfortunately there's an issue that prevents this from working
correctly with Debian images currently anyway, for which a solution has
not yet even been decided upon.

An alternative, for the time being, which would be a pain, I know,
would be to keep the two images on disk on your computer, and write
whichever one you need to the one pen drive you have, when you need it.

Another option to consider is netinst. This is a solution that involves
a small stub that runs on the system itself and retrieves stuff from
another system over a network connection. As long as a local network
connection to this other computer is available, this might work well
for you. You thus might be able to get away with fitting netinst based
installers onto DVDs/CDs, and setting things up for both i386 and amd64
on the hard disk of this other system they fetch stuff from. I am
afraid that this vague description of things is the best I can offer
you at present though as I have no experience with it and only this
basic idea of how it works.

On Wed, 2020-04-15 at 21:10 +0000, dbgr wrote:
> I believe I did not made myself clear. When I say DVD I am not
> saying 
> the medium itself, but the images that the 'debian team' provide to
> burn 
> to the medium (the ones with a much larger pool of packages than the
> cd 
> ones, capable of installing a whole graphical user interface/desktop 
> environment without the need for an internet connection).
> 
> I usually copy this images (or my custom one - larger than a DVD) to
> a 
> usb thumb drive (flash drive/usb stick/pendrive) using disk dump
> (dd). 
> And I was hoping to make an image using live-build to put in one of
> this 
> (they are much more expensive than DVDs here :-/) to have a live
> system 
> and a multi-arch installer (with a big pool of packages) in a single 
> 'device'.
> 
> Is there any way to achieve this? I would love to use live-build to 
> automate the process, but if anyone could point me in the direction
> of 
> doing it in any other way it would be very much appreciated :)
> 
> 
> 
> On 2020-04-15 20:32, jnqnfe@gmail.com wrote:
> > DVDs are cheap. I'd suggest that it is in no way worth the time
> > you'll
> > spend hacking things about to achieve this, when you could simply
> > have
> > separate i386 and amd64 discs instead.
> > 
> > I speak with no authority as to live-build plans, but afaik there
> > are
> > no plans at all to do anything in this area.
> > 
> > On Wed, 2020-04-15 at 18:56 +0000, dbgr wrote:
> > > Hello.
> > > 
> > > I was not sure if this email should've been sent to both list. So
> > > sorry
> > > if it should've not :-/
> > > 
> > > I am using the live-build version 20191221 (the one in testing)
> > > on a
> > > debian stable/buster system to build an live image with and
> > > integrated
> > > debian installer cdrom (with the '--debian-installer cdrom'
> > > flag/option)
> > > with no problems.
> > > 
> > > My original plan with this image is to use it (also) to install
> > > debian
> > > in both i386 and amd64 machines, with or without a connection to
> > > the
> > > internet.
> > > 
> > > So, for me, I believe the best option would be to integrate a
> > > multi-
> > > arch
> > > and/or DVD version of the debian installer. (even better would be
> > > to
> > > integrate a multi-arch DVD installer - since debian dropped this
> > > version
> > > of the installer I've been 'hacking' one together =P)
> > > 
> > > Is there any way that you know of to integrate any of this
> > > installer
> > > options (or even a 'custom' one) in live-build? Is there a plan
> > > to do
> > > so
> > > in the future as an option?
> > > 
> > > Thank you for your attention.
> > > 
> > > --
> > > 
> > > dbgr
> > >