The motivation behind this effort is to have the USB stick function like a regular hard drive and provide the basic functionality for some virtual or real machine to do exactly what it is supposed to do (and nothing much else). Again, a compressed file system would be lovely, but a plain journaled ext2 seems to allow a good start.
The installation is performed via deboostrap. cdebootstrap should also work, but it has not for me. Then to be added is a bootloader. I tried with grub2, but it reads from hd0 instead of hd1 when tested on a Windows machine, and I failed to change that. If hd0 is correct for a diskless client I cannot tell. I was then successful with extlinux, an ext2-compatible syslinux. The following worked for me.
Some parameters to be used throughout the remainder of these instructions
device=/dev/sdb # where the stick appears locally ddevice=/dev/sda # where the stick appears when booted on target machine partno=1 # number of partition you want to boot from mountpoint="/mnt/stick" # directory for the stick to show up mirror="http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian" # from where to download # packages that shall be installed packages="boinc-client autodock autogrid autodocktools gromacs r-cran-qtl r-recommended" kernelversion=$(apt-cache show linux-image-amd64| grep Depends|cut -f2 -d\ | cut -f3,4,5 -d-)
Now the real thing starts
sudo fdisk $device # create a partition mke2fs -j $device$partno # journaled ext2 file system tune2fs -c 0 $device$partno # don't check [ -d "$mountpoint" ] || sudo mkdir "$mountpoint" # prepare mount point mount -t ext2 $device$partno "$mountpoint" debootstrap --include=openssh-client,nfs-common squeeze "$mountpoint" $mirror
A disadvantage of this setup is the limited space to cache the packages - the binaries eat up the disk space that is needed to unpack them. And apt-get does not care about removing packages from /var/cache/apt to free disk space during installation. After the debootstrap, one should install in fractions rather than all in one - also depending on the size of your medium. A 4GB USB stick was found to be sufficient, but far less comfy than originally anticipated. Go for at least 8GB.
chroot "$mountpoint" # some basic infrastructure apt-get install debian-keyring build-essential dhcp3-client # debian-med apt-get install med-bio-dev apt-get clean # more advanced packages - adjust to your liking for p in $packages; do echo "Installing $p"; apt-get --no-install-recommends install $p && apt-get clean; done
While still in the chroot, the password of root needs to be set.
passwd root
And how to access the network should be specified - please adjust:
cat > /etc/network/interfaces <<EONET # The loopback network interface auto lo iface lo inet loopback # The primary network interface auto eth0 iface eth0 inet dhcp EONET
For getting the beast to boot, I attempted the following. The kernel should be installed, first, and the installation inspects the /proc directory, so this is prepared for it, too.
#sudo chroot "$mountpoint" # entering the chroot just created, if not already in cat /etc/fstab # make sure you really are in the chroot and # hence want to overwrite this echo "Will be overwritten in ten seconds if you don't CTRL-C" sleep 10 # you shall not copy and paste blindly cat > /etc/fstab << EOFSTAB # <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass> proc /proc proc defaults 0 0 $ddevice$partno / ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1 EOFSTAB mount /proc apt-get install linux-image # answering 'Y' to the questions asked, except for the # preparation for the initrd, which is fine - press "don't cancel"
Now the boot loader should be installed. It was not clear from the documentation (#548424) about how the configuration file should be named - so some good soul please improve the description given here.
# still in the chroot cat > /extlinux.conf <<EOCFG DEFAULT debian-med-$kernelversion LABEL debian-med-$kernelversion SAY Debian Med from USB stick KERNEL /boot/vmlinuz-$kernelversion APPEND ro root=$ddevice$partno initrd=/boot/initrd.img-$kernelversion EOCFG exit # now back from the chroot # here I have indeed done the cat mbr.bin > $device , but # it should also work without it - I think. If not, see # http://syslinux.zytor.com/wiki/index.php/EXTLINUX sudo apt-get install syslinux extlinux -i "$mountpoint"/boot sync # does not help too much with journaled file systems, though chroot $mountpoint umount /proc umount $mountpoint
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