In Live CD on a removable disk at some point I wrote:
Enrico's note: do we have anything in Debian that we can install and just does that?
Here are the answers:
Well, Enrico, a tool I really grew fond of, which auto-configures X on Debian systems is xdebconfigurator, it lacks being auto-run on each system start, which I consider a feature on normal systems, but for your proposed usage (i.e. a portable USB-storage based Debian system), it would certainly be the right thing.
Essentially, it never failed on me. Except for VMware virtual machines, where all it did wrong was that it proposed too high resolutions which resulted from my dual-screen Windows setup I ran VMware on. You might want to give it a try.
I added the support in casper for doing this almost a year ago and it has saved me lots of debugging time. Booting the live CD that way is almost as fast as booting an installed system. If you couple this with using the persistent storage support in casper, you can get the configure-on-boot support together with persistency.
In a later update, slh is quited saying that xresprobe doesn't work on AMD64. This is wrong, I wrote that support based on code by Matthew Garret a little more than nine months ago. I wouldn't recommend incorporating it in new-written code, but rather use libx86
And finally, Marco Amadori writes:
Without needing to look for tools external to Debian, there is already the Debian Live software in sid: live-package, that creates a live system, and casper, that generates an initramfs that can configure a Debian system on the fly.
So far there is no hard disk target for live-package, but the "Iso" target can already do the job quite well. At boot time, Casper's initramfs scans all the block devices, so it works also for USB keys and hard drives.
To obtain a hard drive image, you just need to invoke "make-live" with the options to have the required software, then copy the content of the iso (or of the directory
./debian-live/binary) on a partition and install the boot loader.This is what the future "HD" target of live-package will do; so far it can only build ISO and Netboot images.