Karsten M. Self wrote: > The question (I *said* there was a question) -- what particular steps > are required for configuring a base Debian installation. Best I can > recall, the Debian install basically looks for: > > - keyboard > - language > - time zone > - networking (this appears to be in the ipupdown package) > > ...and a few minor details such as partitioning (which I prefer doing in > advance anyway). In all, not much that can't be done by hand, > particularly by someone who's been down the road before.
Just run base-config. You might want to touch /root/debootstrap_settings first, which it uses to figure out if this is a fresh install or not. Either way it takes care of the entire post-reboot configuration (which does not include networking, partitioning, or language; those are done by dbootstrap). > The option of slapping a base image onto a partitioned disk and > installing it by hand seems almost preferable (and in some cases, > unavoidable). The Debian installer itself is dbootstrap, but doesn's > appear to be readily available outside the installation system itself -- > I couldn't find it lurking elsewhere in Debian, or pull anything called > 'dbootstrap' from any of the install disks at my disposal. Or am I > missing something obvious? It's in the boot-floppies source package, but it is not designed to work outside of the boot floppies environment (although I've done it, on a running system even). You can use debootstrap (note the 'e') to build a debian system in a chroot, from any linux system that has a posix shell, wget, and a few other basic tools (all in busybox) available. -- see shy jo
