First off, congratulations for recognizing this simple truth. I'm not sure where your conception drops off but the execution of this idea is pretty simple.I would like to build a device specific, minimal image, that I can reuse later to reflash that specific device, and can then add on the rest of the environment later,
Creating your image, 'Bronze' in this case being a boot to tty, can be crafted in two different ways. In fabrication, or art, we either add to the piece, or subtract.
A good excercise is to take a fully configured system and strip it down to nothing, and then add back new or different options. During this exercise you inspect what exist, learn about ‘cruft’, and come across enough for paragraphs of discussion you should have with yourself and your favorite note taking application, like cherrytree.
Or you can try to install a minimal system from a netinst and stop at the minimal tty cli only stage. This additive excercise will be much easier to accomplish if you've done prior the reduction excercise.
In all of that play you will determine what exactly is minimum.
The best tool for this is virt-manager. The best imaging tool is qemu-img. Learn them. The alternatives are not worth discussing. So you need one machine, a ‘mother ship’ to host. The first vm to make is the 'imager', a minimal system of your preference with space for images and qemu-utils installed, a small cli only package providing qemu-img.
The physical hangup is the storage types and how to move a vm image to a real machine. This can be straight forward if the media is transferable from one machine to another. Less so if a ‘imager’ OS is needed. The ‘imager’ is a usb bootable OS with a copy of the image to write to the native boot device.
A ‘bronze’ image is on the order of 600 packages and will compress to the CD size range. A ‘Gold’ image is complete and capable of booting a range of common hardware and will be 1000+ packages and a few gigs compressed. At the end of the trip you may find it more expedient to do the majority of activity as a vm. Testing on bare metal should be minimal and to the point. Btw, a ‘Silver’ image is the imager, full of diagnostic packages of all sorts, maybe cli only, maybe Xterm with minimal xorg, maybe a retro ncurses setup, or up to a tight Xfce.
One thing to remember that I've typed many times without effect; a system with a blinking cursor is not broken, it's misconfigured. If you can get to a tty terminal and log in a successful recovery is soley based on operator expertise. Most don't push through...
Of course there are pages and pages of further details to consider. Bite off only what you can chew, swallow and repeat. I would recommend first a minimal ‘stable’, image that, then upgrade to Trixie, and image that. Continue.
On a minimal install, include Aptitude. It can improve the experience ran in Xterm under X having a mouse and better resolution options. I'm not sure how wayland fits into this...ready to do something like apt-get install
Concerning the network and shutdown questions, I'm not yet sure... You can do a vm and pass the usb adapter to test.
Statistics: Posted by CwF — 2024-11-29 17:21 — Replies 3 — Views 78