FAQ

Q. Which operating systems does debootstick support, in the chroot environment?

A. Running debootstick --help-os-support will answer this question.

Q. The generated image fails to boot properly in qemu-kvm and displays cryptic errors, what could be the reason for this?

A. Qemu-KVM proposes 128MB of RAM by default, which is very low for operating systems nowadays. You should increase this amount by using the -m option.

Q. The generated image boots properly in qemu-kvm but not on my real machine, what should I try?

A. The image probably misses a specific driver or firmware for this hardware. Installing this missing piece in the chroot before running debootstick should solve the issue. See also next question.

Q. But I want to generate an image able to boot any hardware! Is it possible?

A. The images generated by debootstick should boot most configurations properly. However, it is possible to install more specific drivers and firmware in the chroot, before running debootstick, to handle even more configurations. For instance, I have used the following kind of code in the chroot:

APT_GET_INSTALL="DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive \
		apt-get install -y --upgrade --no-install-recommends"

sed -i -e 's/main/main contrib non-free/g' /etc/apt/sources.list
apt-get update
firmware_packages="$(apt-cache search --names-only 'firmware-.*' | \
                    awk '{print $1}' | \
                    grep -v 'microbit' | \
                    grep -v firmware-ipw2x00 | \
                    grep -v firmware-ivtv)"
$APT_GET_INSTALL $firmware_packages "*microcode*"
apt-get clean

Notes:

• Some of the firmware packages reside (or have dependencies) in sections contrib and/or non-free, so an update of sources.list may be required (cf. the sed command above). These sections are less used and tested so using them sometimes leads to dependency problems. In the above code, I had to exclude a few results using grep -v because of this. The excluded packages are not needed for OS boot anyway.
• The generated image will obviously be significantly larger.