New Debian From Scratch Image

I’ve just released DFS 0.6.19 at the DFS page. For people that aren’t familiar with DFS, it’s several things:

  • A full “manual” installer for Debian similar to Gentoo’s — you manually run fdisk, mkfs, etc. and then use cdebootstrap to install the base system. The DFS CD contains the information to install either testing or unstable directly.
  • A full text-only rescue environment on the live CD, including tools such as emacs, gcc, kernel source (you can compile a new kernel using only this CD and some disk space somewhere), development environments for multiple languages, filesystem and partitioning tools for just about every filesystem out there, etc.
  • A system for easily building custom live CD environments from Debian packages. Great for building customized rescue CDs or demo CDs.

DFS 0.6.19 has fixes mainly for i386 and amd64. The i386 image contains both i386 and amd64 kernels (the CD boots to Grub and you can choose which one you want at that time). It has newer kernels than the previous release to support some newer hardware, as well as an updated userland.

The dfsbuild package, in sid, is used to generate these images.

2 thoughts on “New Debian From Scratch Image

  1. Steve Kemp says:

    I wrote a small piece about using dfsbuild to create livecds a while back.

    It’s a very simple way of creating a livecd with easily customized packages.

    (Although a little more documentation on creating a kernel to use would be useful – The sample configuration file comes pointing to a kernel that doesn’t seem to exist, and rebuilding the initrd.img file was a pretty painful job).

    1. jgoerzen says:

      That looks great. I think I’ll link to it from the (sparse) manual.

      You can go completely without an initrd.img if you build a non-initrd kernel, which is what I usually do (and especially for these, where initrd certainly does complicate things).

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