Install Debian on a bare metal system with v-i

You need:

• a USB drive, at least 4 GB
• a PC that supports UEFI
• backups: all drives in the PC will be wiped from data

The steps:

1. Download the installer image (v-i.img.xz) and related scripts (configure-installer and write-and-config.sh) from a subdirectory or https://files.liw.fi/v-i/.

   • https://files.liw.fi/v-i/0.4/v-i.img.xz
   • https://files.liw.fi/v-i/0.4/configure-installer
   • https://files.liw.fi/v-i/0.4/write-and-config.sh

2. Unpack the downloaded image.

   unxz v-i.img.xz

   This will use a few gigabytes of disk apace.

3. Write a configuration file for the installer, to allow logging in via SSH to the running installer. If you don’t intend to do that, you can just create an empty file. Otherwise, create a YAML file like the one below, but with values customized for you. You need one of authorized_keys_file or user_ca_pub_file.

   user_ca_pub_file: ~liw/.ssh/ca/userca.pub
   authorized_keys_file: ~liw/.ssh/id_personal.pub

   Either of these two lines configures the installer SSH to allow you to log in as root using SSH. Password logins are not allowed for SSH. You can also log in via the console, as root, without a password.

   The installer configuration file can specify a wifi access point to connect to, if you need that.

   wifi_name: DadItIsThisOne
   wifi_password: hunter2

4. Insert USB drive and find out the device allocated it. I prefer GNOME Disks for this, but you can also look up the device of the USB stick: run sudo dmsg -T. The device name is usually /dev/sdx for some value of x.

5. Write the installer image to the USB drive, and configure it.

   sudo bash write-and-config.sh config.yaml /dev/sdx v-i.img

   This will take a few minutes.

6. Make sure everything has been written to the USB drive. Again, I prefer GNOME Disks for this, but from the command line:

   udisksctl power-off -b /dev/sdx

7. Move the USB drive to the target machine and boot off the drive. How this happens varies from machine to machine. On my Thinkpad X220, I press F12 at the POST screen and then choose the right drive from the boot menu.

8. Wait for the system to boot. Log in as root, either from the virtual console (no password), or via SSH.

   If you need to connect to wifi, you need to log in as root and run the following commands:

   iwctl station wlan0 get-networks
   iwctl station wlan0 connect DadItIsThisOne

   Substitute the name of the network as needed. Enter wifi password when requested.

9. Create a target specification file foo-target.yaml. The name can be anything, but it must be valid YAML. In the example below, there is one NVMe drive that will get the system installed. All drives will be encrypted using LUKS, with the password “hunter2”.

   hostname: x220
   drive: /dev/nvme0n1
   luks: hunter2
   ansible_vars:
     user_pub: |
      ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3NzaC1lZDI1NTE5AAAAIPQe6lsTapAxiwhhEeE/ixuK+5N8esCsMWoekQqjtxjP

   The SSH public key will be added to the root user’s authorized_keys file. See spec.md for a full description of the target specification file.

10. Install. Add the --verbose option to ./v-i if you want to know what’s happening. The first time you run this on a given v-i USB drive, it takes a while: it runs vmdebootstrap and that is just slow. However, the output is cached, so further runs are faster.

    rm -f install.log
    v-i --verbose foo-target.yaml

    This will take few minutes the first time, assuming a fast Internet connection. Further runs go faster.

11. Reboot into the installed system.

12. Finish configuring the system in whatever way you like to do that. I use Ansible.

    Remember to change the LUKS password for each drive.

13. Optional: Let me know how it went.