grml-debootstrap: wrapper around debootstrap for installing plain Debian via grml
I assume you already know debootstrap. Quoting the package description “debootstrap is used to create a Debian base system from scratch, without requiring the availability of dpkg or apt. It does this by downloading .deb files from a mirror site, and carefully unpacking them into a directory which can eventually be chrooted into.” I already described the procedure for installing Debian sarge and etch via grml in my private blog.
I usually install plain Debian systems via debootstrap, because it’s simple, fast and just works. Especially because grml provides recent hardware detection I can often install Debian on systems where the official debian installer might not work at all. But running debootstrap is a boring task, especially if you often do this kind of installation the tasks during installation are boring. Therefore I decided to write a wrapper around debootstrap, and there we are:
% apt-cache show grml-debootstrap
Description: wrapper around debootstrap for installing plain Debian via grml
This package provides a wrapper suite around deboostrap and
cdebootstrap for installing a plain Debian system via grml.
.
All you have to do is adjust a few variables in configuration
file /etc/debootstrap/config and invoke grml-debootstrap then.
A plain and base Debian system will be installed on the given
device then. Customization of this process is possible as well.
Installation of a plain and base Debian etch system is pretty fast and easy this way. The first public version of grml-debootstrap is available in the grml repository. Just apt-get it when running the grml live-cd. As usual: feedback is welcome.