Building Debian Boot-Floppies

It may be useful to build your own boot-floppies for the Debian distribution. One reason could be to use an updated packages base, another reason could be that you want to provide a different language than English. In my case, both is true. Let's see what we have to do.

First of all, you have to install the boot-floppies package from Debian. It depends on a pile of packages, but you will need more: syslinux (providing kernel images), dosfstools (providing mkdosfs).

After you have installed everything, edit the top Makefile. You have to tell the script where your local mirror of Debian GNU is, you will need at least the base section.

   ftp_archive=/home/ftp/debian

If the scripts detect an Incoming directory they will copy everything from there into your local updates directory. You might want to turn that off - I had to, since there was a new libc flying around in the Incoming directory - which didn't provide the dynamic linker. thus you might have to comment out the following section:

   localfiles:
   # localfiles:: updates
   # ifneq ($(strip $(localpackages)),)
   #       for f in $(localpackages); do \
   #               if [ ! -f updates/`basename $$f` ]; then \
   #                       echo copying `basename $$f` to updates/ ; \
   #                       cp $$f updates/ ; \
   #               fi ; \
   #       done
   # endif

If you don't know where to get tecra images, you'd better turn off that as well.

   #### Laptop part
   resc1440tecra-safe.bin:
   #resc1440tecra-safe.bin:        resc1440tecra.bin safe.sh
   #       ./safe.sh resc1440tecra.bin resc1440tecra-safe.bin

   resc1440tecra.bin:
   # resc1440tecra.bin:    linuxtecra sys_maptecra.gz rescue.sh Makefile\
   #               root.bin $(shell find scripts/rescue -type f )
   #       ./rescue.sh tecra $(kerneltecra) root.bin 1440 $(debianversion) "" $(LINGUA) $(SFONT)

If you want to provide non-english boot-floppies you have to set the language in the main Makefile as

   # LINGUA=C
   LINGUA=de

If you want to provide non-English external programs like modconf, cfdisk or mke2fs, you have to adjust scripts/rootdisk/SMALL_BASE_LIST_all. In order to add the language files you want to add:

   usr/share/locale/de/LC_MESSAGES/e2fsprogs.mo
   usr/share/locale/de/LC_MESSAGES/util-linux.mo

Finally you have to run make release.