[sclug] Embedded Debian

[David Given]

Since there seem to be a lot of Debian experts currently reading the list...

I have a shiny new Shuttle PC sitting under my TV. It's going to be a media 
box, using custom-written software (gstreamer is *very cool*).

I would like it to boot off a CD, because I want to approach the thing from 
the appliance point of view rather than the Unix server point of view. The 
idea is I stick the disk in the drive, boot it, it picks up a couple of 
settings off the hard disk, autodetects everything else, and goes. Because 
this is running on a limited selection of hardware, this is actually pretty 
easy. The hardest part appears to be persuading isolinux to behave.

However:

I need to find a good way of generating minimalist liveCDs. I'm developing my 
media package on Debian, and it uses gstreamer, GTK2, ruby, X, and a whole 
bunch of complex dependencies. Rebuilding everything manually every time 
something changes will be a nightmare; surely I should be able to use Debian 
packages for everything, so it'll get the dependencies right for me.

The naive approach is to use debootstrap. Which, indeed, works fine, but is 
far too heavyweight. I don't *need* exim on my box. I don't need bash, even. 
In fact, the vast bulk of the stuff debootstrap installs is completely 
irrelevant. I don't need the Debian package management system, I don't need 
/usr/share/doc, in fact most of /var is useless. I can't seem to find a way of 
persuading debootstrap to use local .deb files, either; it always insists on 
downloading new copies into the target filesystem, and I don't need that either.

Does anyone know how I can put together a *really minimal* system --- we're 
talking ash & busybox minimal --- from a set of Debian packages? Is there a 
list somewhere of the absolute minimal subset of Debian packages you need to 
get a system that runs?

-- 
[insert interesting .sig here]