Jochen Schulz wrote:
David Barrett:Well, debootstrap is great (totally awesome, really) for setting up a chroot, but I'm not super sure how to pull the rug out from underneath the old bootable OS installation and insert the new bootable chroot, swap in the new kernel, etc.You'll need a free partition for the new root filesystem. Just create a new filesystem on it and install a base system using debootstrap. After that you only need to tweak your grub.conf to use the new filesystem as / and you're basically done.
Cool, thanks for the overview. This is definitely an option I'll look into, but for now I'm trying to run the actual installer.
Toward this end, do you know if I can just unpack the businesscard ISO into this new filesystem (instead of using debootstrap) and configure it with a preseed file? This seems sensible, but I don't see how to avoid deleting itself midway when I do the full-drive format.
Basically, is there any way to run the standard installer on a remote, headless server and end up with a totally standard one-partition system?
-david