[Fwd: DL Installer]
Daniel Baumann wrote:
> Marco Ghirlanda wrote:
> > Chris Lamb? Who's Chris?
>
> Chris Lamb, or lamby on irc.oftc.net
Me. :)
Regarding an installer, you'll have to be a little more specific to what you
are after. There are three different types of installer that I can think of:
1. "Normal" Debian Installer
This is a Debian Live image with a seperate kernel and initrd which (when
selected from the bootloader) launches into a standard Debian Installer
instance, just as if you had downloaded a CD image of Debian and booted
it.
This means that Debian is installed by fetching and installing .deb
packages using debootstrap, either from the CD or some mirror, resulting
in a real Debian system being installed to the hard disk.
This whole process can be preseeded and customised in a number of ways; see
the relevant wiki pages[0] and installation guides[1] for more. This is
working now.
2. "Live" Debian Installer
This is a Debian Live image with a seperate kernel and initrd which (when
selected from the bootloader) launches into an instance of the Debian
Installer.
Installation will proceed as of #1 but at the actual package installation
stage, instead of using debootstrap to fetch and install .deb packages, the
"live" filesystem image is copied to the target. The Debian Installer then
proceeds to install and configure things such as bootloaders and local
users, etc.
This is working now (assuming you use live-installer >= 6 from unstable
- see Daniel's message for the link).
3. "Ubuntu"-style installer
This is where you boot into a graphical Debian Live system and run a
wizard-based program which installs and configures the live system, all the
time remaining inside the live graphical environment.
This is currently NOT possible with Debian Live.
Please note:
* Please note my careful use of capital letters when referring to the
"Debian Installer" - when used like this I refer explicitly to the
official installer for the Debian system, not anything else. See its
Wikipedia page[2] for more. It is often seen abbreviated to d-i.)
* In the place of selecting options from a bootloader it is possible to use
kexec to launch immediately into a Debian Installer instance without
requiring a reboot or fiddling with boot options. I don't know whether
this is generally supported or advised, but it works for me.
* It would probably be not too difficult to start one of the first two
installation processes via the win32-loader program[3].
(Long mail, sorry, but I can copy/paste it straight into the manual and link
other people to it.)
/Lamby
[0] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller
[1] http://d-i.alioth.debian.org/manual/
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian-Installer
[3] http://goodbye-microsoft.com/more.html
--
Chris Lamb, UK chris at chris-lamb.co.uk
GPG: 0x634F9A20
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