Dear all,

I am facing a two-faceted challenge:

One is to make a very minimal, stable (reproducible in the sense of the same versions of the same package set) OS installation.
Two is to install from the network with netboot (pxe/efi).

Debian has no installer which out-of-the-box could access the contents of an installation CD over the net, but the above is attainable by merging and tweaking the cd- and net-boot initrds, without actually building the installer from scratch. We tested this.

Unfortunately Dev1 has no supported way (?) to be installed without pre-supplying a 300+ MB iso image to the target machine in some out-of-band way, like physically on a CD.

An ideal solution would be to let the cd-installer contain the network-related tools inside the initramfs (like Debian netboot media does) and initialize the network before trying to access the data from the CD. Then it would be easy for us to replace the CD with secured remote data, which we have done with Debian. Otherwise, even a plain Debian-like netbootable installation media would do.

Is there any practical way to reliably acquire or produce such a media, short of learning to be a Dev1 developer?

A related question has been asked by someone else on https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=3197 without any positive answer.

The outfall can decide the OS for hundreds of coming installations, which is why I am asking the question before giving up and taking the pain of systemd brought along by Debian.

Regards
/D