Re: Towards a custom personalized Debian installer
On Thursday, September 17, 2020 05:25:11 AM Richard Owlett wrote:
> On 09/17/2020 03:02 AM, Anssi Saari wrote:
> > Richard Owlett <rowlett@cloud85.net> writes:
> >> The default of copying an ISO file to a device is inconvenient for my
> >> peculiar goals.
> >> I want an executable installer resident on an ext4 formatted partition.
> >> It must be possible. A testable installer preceded ISO format.
> >> I'm working thru https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/ch04s03,
> >> in particular extracting steps for "Manually copying files to the USB
> >> stick — the flexible way".
> >>
> >> What reference am I missing?
> >
> > I've installed Debian a couple of times with debootstrap. Or actually
> > grml-debootstrap since I had grml on a USB stick for rescue use
> > anyways. It does need some kind of Linux environment to run in, not
> > necessarily Debian though.
>
> I unsuccessfully tried to us use debootstrap several years ago.
> Right now I specifically want to use the normal Debian installer on an
> editable file system.
I'm probably missing something, but that doesn't sound very difficult. IIRC,
there are two ways of "copying" an ISO -- I won't describe them exactly
correctly, but, aiui, one way makes a copy of the ISO, and the other way sort
of "unpacks" the iso so that files / executable within the iso are distinct and
usable (I forget which is which, but, again, iirc, one way is using dd,
another way could use a variety of approaches including cp).
It seems to me, simply choosing the way that unpacks an ISO, and doing that
with an ext4 filesystem as the target, should do the job you want.
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