On Tue, Nov 06, 2001 at 12:50:52PM +0100, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > On 6 Nov 2001, at 4:03, Colin Watson wrote: > > base*.tgz is no longer needed. The boot-floppies build the > > base system using a program called debootstrap instead. > > Ah yes. And from what? > > Sorry, maybe I don't see the obvious -- but even in that > case, please give me a hint. Here's what I did so far, if > nothing else, at least it may make you smile... > > The setup requires me to provide some source in order to > install the base system, so the content of the floppies > obviously won't suffice.
Indeed. debootstrap downloads ordinary .deb files from the Debian archive (the advantage of this is that there's no problem with keeping the base tarball in sync with the actual distribution) and installs them. The first couple of packages (dpkg, libc6, etc.) are installed using special techniques to get the infrastructure there, and then everything else is just installed with dpkg. > My current approach to provide the files was to "mirror" > them on a local machine and export them via nfs. Everytime > the installation routine complained about a file it needed, > I went to get it. > /dists/woody/Release, > /dists/woody/main/binary-i386/Packages > ... > Now, the installation routine tells me that it is "Calling > debootstrap", together with a progress bar wich fills > within a fraction of a second. Then nothing happens for > about half a minute, eventually it aborts with "couldn't > download adduser". If you can't use HTTP or FTP from a full mirror, you'll need to download the .debs manually and put them in the locations on your mirror specified by the Packages file. The current list of packages debootstrap tries to download for i386 are: adduser apt apt-utils at base-config base-files base-passwd bash bsdmainutils bsdutils console-common console-data console-tools console-tools-libs cpio cron debconf debianutils dhcp-client diff dpkg e2fsprogs ed exim fdutils fileutils findutils gettext-base grep groff-base gzip hostname ifupdown info ipchains klogd libc6 libcap1 libdb2 libdb3 libgdbmg1 libident libldap2 liblockfile1 libncurses5 libnewt0 libpam-modules libpam-runtime libpam0g libpcap0 libpcre3 libpopt0 libreadline4 libsasl7 libstdc++2.10-glibc2.2 libwrap0 lilo login logrotate mailx makedev man-db manpages mawk mbr modconf modutils mount nano ncurses-base ncurses-bin net-tools netbase netkit-inetd netkit-ping nvi passwd pciutils pcmcia-cs perl-base ppp pppconfig pppoe procps psmisc sed setserial shellutils slang1 sysklogd syslinux sysvinit tar tasksel tcpd telnet textutils util-linux whiptail I believe that there's a way to download a single tarball of all of these .debs to make the job easier, but I'm afraid I don't know the details. Search the mailing list archives (e.g. debian-boot) for "basedebs.tgz". Cheers, -- Colin Watson [EMAIL PROTECTED]
