Re: Debian repository available on USB flash rather than CD/DVD sets?
Zenaan Harkness wrote:
On 2/18/14, Richard Owlett <rowlett@cloud85.net> wrote:
Zenaan Harkness wrote:
I really am happy to help, and it is clear that so are others.
Creating your own personal "quick and dirty" repo is a relatively easy
thing to do (in my world at least :)
I've reached the limit of "quick and dirty". I'm well into "clean
and very peculiar" ;/
OK, ok, marketing taken on board. Let us change the wording (which I
copied from the procedure I originally found on the net):
The "quick, clean and functional" solution to a local repo is, well,
quick, simple, clean and functional.
:)
How's that sound?
*) It's quick and simple - just a few commands.
*) It's clean - a single repo index file, voila!
*) It's functional - a full, working, local repo! Great!
Not sure if we need more marketing here ... oh I know:
*) Inspiring - witness the power of Debian in a few minutes!
*) Powerful - take control of your repo, your pc, your world!
*) Awesome - almost nothing else needed you could ask for.
The _only_, _minor_, downside was that the apt signature checking was
not automatic - BUT WAIT! there's more! You are relying on the DVD set
you purchased, so that doesn't matter. At all!
Like "beauty", "minor" is in the eye of the beholder ;/
That is _exactly_ the sticking point causing to say "clean and
very peculiar".
Synaptic would issue a warning for every app installed.
That would be unacceptable in my environment for two reasons:
1. I would get in habit of ignoring warning messages (I do plan on
installing applications not in the official repositories).
2. I was planning on using volunteers to install some systems
at church.
Though I might know what was "safe" it could cause confusion.
The only "problem" and it can be ignored! How wonderful :)
...
So, if you wish to create your own bootable USB stick, which also
contains a full local Debian mirror, I and I'm sure others here will
be glad to assist you creating that. Being comfortable creating that
would be a very good thing for you particularly, given your
dialup-only Internet.
So, have a crack, and just ask again when/if you get stuck :)
I will.
From memory, someone suggested that a command as simple as the
following will turn your usb stick into a bootable debian-installer
DVD style USB stick:
dd if=/my/debian-boot-dvd.iso of=/dev/sdBLAH bs=1M
I saw a link to that in one of the links from
https://wiki.debian.org/BootUsb which you mentioned in your other
message. I'll have a chance to experiment with that latter today.
(With the bs=1M just meaning set a large blocksize, which is just to
improve performance of the usb stick creation step.)
That's awesome! A single command, and you don't even need a gui to do
it! (Personally, I really love such power, simplicity and
functionality, at the fingertip keypressing of a few keyboard keys :)
The only thing I'm not sure on is expanding the thusly created ISO9660
(or whatever) filesystem, so it can contain your repo, or creating two
partitions on the usb stick and putting your repo on the second
partition (although I think the only thing that changes, is the dd
command above, eg create two partitions, one a bit larger than your
DVD image, then use dd to copy the DVD debian isntall disk1 image, to
the first partition - but I'm not sure on this detail sorry, I'm sure
someone else will pipe up).
And the manpage for dd is not enlightening either.
Happy power learning :)
Zenaan
Thanks
Reply to: