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Creating a Custom Linux Debian 5 (lenny) installation

Hello Experts.
I am still trying to create a custom Debian 5 Installation which includes my own developed packages, I am very close to make it, actually found this very interesting part that tells pretty much everything, but there is something very important that I cannot figure out in the end, the link in particular is this one:
http://wiki.debian.org/Simple-CDD/Howto
What I can't figure out is the "structure" or what should I put in the "NAME.packages" file that the steps mention, more precisely in the step called "Create a profile named NAME".
Dos anyone have any idea of what should I type in there?

thank you.

torimar

That's completely at liberty for you to choose; could be your name or debian user name, if you want to give it a personal touch; could be the proposed name of your new sub distro, if you want to distribute it to others; could be a functional descriptor, like DebianMinimal or Multimedia or SecureDebian or whatever.

You only need to be consistent in usage and use only the one name chosen wherever the variable 'NAME' figures in the HowTo.

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chrios

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torimar

Chrios is right, I misread the question. Apologies.

But I wonder: why would the authors of the HowTo put these instructions into confusing pseudo-code if it were meaningless?

I guess what they wanted to provide you with is a scripted way of creating the profile package list. The line

$ for p in list-of-packages-you-want-installed ; do echo $p >> profiles/NAME.packages ; done

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will read the list of packages from any text file you created containing a list of packages each in a single line, like given in Chrios's example. Then replace "list-of-packages-you-want-installed" by the name of that text file to automatically create a package list in the profile's folder by executing that short single-line script.

chrios

Torimar, i'm sorry, but I don't think that is correct.

In the code, "list-of-packages-you-want-installed" is meant to be replaced with one or several names separated by space, such as:

$ for p in screen openssh-server vim ctags bzip2 ; do echo $p >> profiles/NAME.packages ; done

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which will append the text from my example to NAME.packages (or create the file if it didn't exist). I just think that it's easier to edit the file directly using a text editor.

If he wants to add a list of packages from a file (mypackages.txt) into NAME.packages, he could use "cat mypackages.txt >> NAME.packages".

darwin_roach

ASKER

thanks for the help, I will be reviewing this today.