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Introduction

Debootstrap is a Linux program that turns a regular directory into a Debian root filesystem that is almost ready to be used to boot Debian GNU/Linux. It does this by pulling the required "base" packages from the Debian software repositories.

Debootstrap is an incredibly effective way to build a new system when you have a Linux system (not necessarily Debian) that is already working. I have used it to:

• Migrate my workstation from Slackware to Debian. I was able to get almost all of the apps I required installed and working before I rebooted into Debian for the first time.
• Create a Linux-on-Linux system: a small "guest" Linux system inside a chroot jail, within a host Linux system. This may be done for security purposes, although the root user is always able to escape the jail. I used it to run an i386 guest inside an x86-64 host.
• Remote setup of a Linux system. Linux installers do not normally offer the facility to run an install remotely, but with debootstrap, you can do the entire install through an existing Linux system. (This can be done using a Knoppix CD by enabling the SSH daemon.)

Installing with debootstrap using a Knoppix CD

Here is a useful guide for initialising a new Debian system using debootstrap:
http://www.inittab.de/manuals/debootstrap.html
This guide is highly recommended. But it assumes you have booted from a Knoppix CD, which already has debootstrap on it. It is not hard to get a Knoppix CD, but you may want to set up your new Debian system while your old one is still working.

Installing with debootstrap on a Debian system

Installing with debootstrap on some other Linux system

If you don't have debootstrap or a Debian system, but you do have some kind of Linux system, you can get debootstrap as follows:

1. Visit http://packages.debian.org/stable/admin/debootstrap and download the appropriate version for your architecture.
2. Move this file to a temporary directory (not the directory you want to install Debian in).
3. Extract the .deb file using ar x debootstrap*.dev (yep, .deb files are ar archives).
4. This produces three files:
   • control.tar.gz
   • data.tar.gz
   • debian-binary
5. Extract data.tar.gz with tar xzf data.tar.gz (this is where the package files actually are - the other files are metadata).
6. That extracts the debootstrap distribution in a usr subdirectory.
7. Set the environment variable DEBOOTSTRAP_DIR to point to $PWD/usr/lib/debootstrap.
8. Make sure you have wget installed.
9. Now you can run usr/sbin/debootstrap as specified in the instructions here.

		Copyright (C) Jack Whitham 1997-2008