Installing Debian as an upgrade

These instructions assume you are starting from build 559 or later, which has support for booting from multiple images.

Secondly, you must have enabled the upgradable stuff; at the moment this is done by booting with 'upgrade' on the kernel command line. Deep magic here; it will become less magic in the future.

Now, boot into sugar. You are currently running from the system in /run/a, and /run/b contains a mirror image of this. We're going to replace /run/b with debian.

Step 1: from an existing debian system, as root (fakeroot won't work, sadly):

# apt-get install debootstrap
# mkdir mnt
# debootstrap etch mnt http://http.us.debian.org/debian/

Wait awhile. Eventually, you'll have a complete debian bootstrap system in mnt.

# tar -C mnt -czf xo-debian.tgz .
# /bin/rm -rf mnt

Put xo-debian.tgz on a usb key.

Step 2. from the XO, log in as root on console. Insert usb key.

# cd /run
# /bin/rm -rf b ; mkdir b ; cd b
# tar xzf /media/*/xo-debian.tgz

Step 3: configuration.

You need to setup the following files: /etc/hosts, /etc/fstab:

# cp /etc/hosts /run/b/etc/hosts
# cp /etc/fstab /run/b/etc/fstab

You also need to use the fix at [1] to make apt work.

Step 4: install fun stuff.

To be continued