Thanks for the hint. Ok I've got the live build to actually build an image on the thumb drive. Merely inserting the thumb drive into the laptop mounted it at /media/scratch but "mount" showed it indeed was mounted as "nodev". I have no idea what that means but it was apparently breaking the build.
This was fixed by "sudo umount /media/scratch" followed by making a directory in home/user
"sudo mkdir scratch" and then re-mounting the drive "sudo mount /dev/sdb1 scratch".
So far so good. However, there is a new problem... I was trying to build a xfce-desktop build with an additional package, firmware-iwlwifi, and and an updated configuration file, /lib/udev/keymaps/hewlett-packard-compaq_keymaps, but the resulting binary.img file ended up being 127 mb and size and when
booted was apparently only a minimal system without any desktop.
The command line for lb config was as follows-
sudo lb config -b usb-hdd --archive-areas "main contrib non-free" --packages "firmware-iwlwifi" --packages-lists "xfce-desktop"
followed by-
sudo mkdir -p config/chroot_local-includes/lib/udev/keymaps
sudo cp /media/disk/hewlett-packard-compaq_elitebook config/chroot_local-includes/lib/udev/keymaps
finally, the build is invoked-
sudo lb build
So again I am stumped. I assumed the configuration parameter --packages-lists "xfce-desktop" would build a complete xfce-desktop into the image but for some reason it is not.
Anyone got any ideas?
Thanks in advance