Quickly: debootstrapping Dapper

The recipe in the debootstrap(8) page is pretty close, but it doesn’t completely do it for me. Here’s what I do:

http_proxy=http://proxy:3128 debootstrap --include=language-pack-en dapper dapper-root
mount -t proc none dapper-root/proc
cp -a /etc/hosts dapper-root/etc/hosts
cp -a /etc/apt/{apt.conf,preferences,sources.list} dapper-root/etc/apt/
chroot dapper-root
pwconv

There’s actually not much different there. Adding language-pack-en (or whatever your locale is) avoids all the nasty “I can’t find your locale” sort of messages you’ll get if (for example) Perl can’t find your locale. I also copy in my APT configurations; apt.conf comes in because it has my proxy settings. pwconv makes some things (adduser in particular, I think) not bitch (chage: the shadow password file is not present).

And don’t do what I seem to do all the time: try to debootstrap as non-root. Man, does that not work. (While we’re on the subject: make sure you don’t try this on a partition that has things like nodev or nosuid set on it.)