Now that I've compiled a GRUB binary that works on the Joggler, I can try booting debian-installer. Being able to run this would be nice, since it means that instead of preparing the system on another machine using debootstrap, you can just install it the usual way. I'm going to be trying to install wheezy, the current testing release; it's too late to fix any issues that come up during a stable install. The development version of debian-installer also has several features that are helpful.
I usually use netboot images to install Debian, though I don't actually boot them from the network. You can boot the netboot kernel and initrd from any existing Linux bootloader, and as long as your network interface is supported by the drivers included, the rest of the install can proceed directly from a Debian mirror, with no need to download an ISO. To try this, you need four things:
- A USB stick with a small FAT16 partition.
- An EFI GRUB binary built with the patch from my previous post.
- The linux and initrd.gz from the d-i daily builds archive, and a grub.cfg which will load them (you don't need any command line arguments).
- The firmware for the Joggler's wireless interface: download the firmware archive here and extract the firmware-ralink udeb.