No Spam wrote: [...]
I'm not sure that that's what's happening, but it makes sense. You can easily install a filesystem with "debootstrap - Bootstrap a basic Debian system".That seems like such overkill.
I'm trying to do something similar; I'm putting together an embedded system, and want to populate it from Debian packages. I need to create a minimal chrooted Debian system in a subdirectory and then copy it to my target.
debootstrap is, indeed, overkill. It insists on not only creating a local admin database but also on downloading all the packages it needs *into* that admin database, which takes forever. It also insists on installing all sorts of stuff that I'm never going to want to use --- my embedded system doesn't *need* exim, for example.
What I eventually did is the incredibly simple and naive:
for package in debs/*; do
echo "Unpacking $package..."
dpkg --extract "debs/$package" target
done
rm -rf target/usr/share/doc target/usr/share/man target/var/lib/dpkg
This just extracts the files. It doesn't attempt to do any setup or maintain
any admin database, and I have to do download the debs and do all the
dependencies manually, but it does work (and it's fast).
-- [insert interesting .sig here]