I recently noticed the Debian Installer is happy to install on a plain block device without a partition table. All you need to do is to create the file system on a block device before proceeding to the partitioning phase in the installer. The installer falsely indicates there’s a partition there, but in reality this represents the file system on a block device.
This helps working with virtual machines as the resize operation no longer involves modifying the partition table. The 4.19 kernel, possibly some earlier kernels, too, can re-read the partition table without a reboot so the problem of having the partition table isn’t quite as bad as it used to be. Either way, it’s just easier without partitions.
Here’s a recipe for a pancake which I’ve originally received from somewhere, and which after numerous tweaks and improvements to the proportions of the ingredients, the ingredients themselves as well as the baking procedure, is effectively an entirely new recipe.
The ingredients are:
1 l milk (oat milk has been proven to be a good alternative)
0,7 dl rapeseed oil
7 dl spelt flour (you may vary the proportion between fine and wholemeal flour; I use 3,5 dl of each; wheat may be used if in dire straits, in that case use a little less of it)
1 tbsp cardamom
1 dl sugar
3 eggs
Mix all the ingredients, leaving the flours and the oil last. Use a whisker to avoid clumps from being formed. Use butter (or rapeseed oil) to grease a deep oven tray. Let the dough sit at room temperature for about one hour before putting it in the oven.
Heat the oven to around 190°C. Pour the dough to the tray while making sure the cardamom won’t be left to the bottom of the bowl. Bake for around 45 minutes. The pancake should be served warm, with whipped cream, jam or simply plain sugar.
This is a recipe for a lemon pie. It consists of a base and filling.
Ingredients
The base
~ 2 dl of fine spelt flour
~ 2 dl of coarse spelt flour
spelt flour can be substituted for wheat flour in case of an emergency
1 dl sugar
65 g of butter
0,6 dl of canola oil (or add an equivalent amount of butter)
Zest of three organic lemons
An egg
1 tsp of baking powder
The filling
4 eggs
4 dl of icing sugar
Juice of three lemons
1 tsp of barley starch (potato starch should do as well)
3 dl of cream
1 tsp of vanilla sugar
Instructions
The base
Begin with mixing melted butter, canola oil and sugar (update 2020-02-10: added the amount of sugar). Before breaking and then adding the eggs (without the shells), make sure the mix isn’t too hot so the eggs would coagulate. Remove the zest from the organic lemons. Don’t use the zest if the lemons you have are not organic. If you have a wand mixer at your disposal, you can add the zest to the mix and mix it with the wand mixer. Otherwise cut the zest into tiny bits and add it to the mix, then use a whisk to blend the mix.
Mix the flours well with the baking powder. This, just as the further steps of the recipe, is best done without the wand mixer. Add the flour-baking powder mix little by little until the dough no longer sticks to the hands, and then a little bit more to avoid the dough being too soft. Don’t knead.
Spread the dough as a approximately evenly thick layer into a medium sized pie dish, extending a few centimetres along the walls of the dish, depending on the size of the dish.
Put the pie dish to freezer and let it stay there until the oven has been heated to 175 °C. This should take around 20 minutes. Put the pie base in the oven for around 20 minutes, or as long as it begins to appear solid.
The filling
Juice the lemons and mix the juice with the eggs, barley starch, vanilla sugar and icing sugar. Add the cream as last, quickly pouring it all to the bowl and mixing it without a hesitation. At this point you may want to remove the foam if there’s a lot of it.
Pour the filling on the pie base carefully to avoid disintegrating the base. Change the oven temperature to 190°C. Put the pie back to the oven for around 45 minutes, or as long as the filling has solidified. For the first 20 minutes, put a layer of tin foil on top of the pie but avoid touching the filling with it. It prevents the filling from drying too much.
Take the pie out of the owen and let it cool down before serving.
The dropbear-initramfs package in Debian is intended to help unlocking encrypted partitions remotely from initramfs. In other words, it can be used to unlock an encrypted block device that may well include the root partition.
Officially only a single IPv4 address may be set up in a convenient way. This weblog post shows how to get around that limitation, without too much hassle.
The only package needed is dropbear-initramfs. Install it:
# apt-get install dropbear-initramfs
The network device is located in specified on the DEVICE environment variable in /etc/initramfs-tools/initramfs.conf. We specify a device that will not exist:
DEVICE=nosuchnetdev
The network configuration would be specified in the IP variable but we omit this as we don’t intend to use the default scripts for setting up the network configuration. Instead, we add a few extra bits to /etc/dropbear-initramfs/config. The dropbear configuration file is actually sourced by the shell so executing commands is entirely possible.
# This line is important --- it fools the initramfs
# scripts to believe the device is already set up.
touch /run/net-nosuchnetdev.conf
# modprobe the driver for your network adapter.
# Change this to correspond to your system.
modprobe e1000e
__getdev2() {
echo ${2%:}
}
__getdev() {
__getdev2 $(ip link list | grep -B 1 $1 | head -1)
}
# MAC addresses of the devices; replace with your own
eth0=$(__getdev 00:11:22:33:44:55)
# Set up network here as you like. The configuration will be
# overridden with what you have set up in /etc/network/interfaces
# once the boot continues.
ip addr add 192.168.1.1/24 dev $eth0
ip addr add 2001:db8::1/32 dev $eth0
ip link set up dev $eth0
Now, update initramfs and you should be ready to log in remotely to initramfs on your next boot.
Edit 2018-09-25:
Remember to put your own public key to /etc/dropbear-initramfs/authorized_keys so you’ll be actually able to log in. Also see the documentation in /usr/share/doc/dropbear-initramfs/README.initramfs .
Edit 2018-09-20:
The initramfs image can be updated with the following command:
# update-initramfs -u
Edit 2018-09-25:
After rebooting you can log in remotely as root via ssh. Run
# cryptroot-unlock
After providing the passphrase your system should boot up as expected.
Most commonly the guides for installing (GNU/)Linux distributions in virtual machines such as QEMU (+KVM) involve using emulation of a graphics display. This is most likely because it’s convenient, and most installation programs default to using VGA display on PCs.
While this is mostly effortless, there are a few drawbacks. VNC requires listening a TCP port or a Unix socket on the server. If configure the VNC server to listen a TCP port, anyone can connect, so be sure to set a decent password for the VNC server. Still, even if you set a decent password, a security-conscious administrator might not want to expose that TCP port at all, possibly even locally. If you use a Unix socket, it’s a pain to use the VNC connection if the network throughput is limited. Even the VNC protocol does require a lot more network throughput to be usable than just a remote shell on a terminal would.
The alternative is to switch to a virtual serial port as soon as possible in the installation. Most distributions do not support installation through a serial port out of the box, but BIOS may support VGA emulation on a serial console. That’s right; you get what you’d see on a VGA display to a serial port. Only text modes are supported, naturally. In Debian, the package offering such a BIOS ROM option is sgabios.
This guide expects you’re also using libvirt.
Enabling serial console and serial port VGA emulation on a virtual machine
First, install the sgabios package:
apt-get install sgabios
Then, add the following line to the os section of the QEMU virtual machine’s libvirt domain:
<bios useserial='yes'/>
This enables VGA text mode emulation for a serial port. Enabling the serial port itself and serial console is achieved by adding the following entries to the devices section of a libvirt domain:
Edit 2018-04-12: In addition to adding the above lines, you will need to remove existing console definitions.
Installation
These instructions are for Debian stable. The same approach is likely to work on other distributions as well.
Set up the virtual serial port as instructed above, and start the installer. I don’t elaborate that as there are plenty of good guides for that. Use virsh to connect to the virtual serial port after starting the domain:
virsh console domain
You should see the first messages from BIOS or the boot loader, depending on how fast you connect to the domain’s console after starting the domain. You may also see nothing at all until you push the arrow buttons.
Debian installer on virtual serial port with sgabios VGA emulation
The arrow keys don’t appear to work very well. Select the item you want, i.e. non-graphical installation. Don’t press enter yet, instead press tab. This lets you to set kernel’s command line options. Remove “— quiet” and replace it with
console=ttyS0 vga=none
And press enter. You should be able to continue the installation normally now.
Once the packages and the boot loader are installed, do not reboot the system yet. We still need to configure the boot loader to use the virtual serial console. Choose to go back, and then execute a shell:
Bind mount the virtual file systems under /target and chroot to /target:
mount -o bind /proc /target/proc
mount -o bind /sys /target/sys
mount -o bind /dev /target/dev
chroot /target /bin/bash
Permanently enabling serial port console for Grub and Linux kernel
Setting the kernel command line to include the serial console earlier only allowed installing Debian, but the serial console configuration now needs to be made permanent. That can be done by changing Grub configuration:
nano /etc/default/grub
Replace the two lines here in the default configuration (in two different locations of the file):
And you’re done! The next time you reboot the virtual machine, it should start off with the console available on the serial port right from the beginning.
Finishing the installation
If you were installing Debian, unmount the file systems you mounted and return to the installer:
exit # to exit the chroot environment
umount /target/sys /target/dev /target/proc
exit # to get back to the installer
Now we’re ready to proceed to reboot the system.
The installation is now complete and you can boot from the virtual disk, with virtual serial console enabled.
