Practicality of a Debian base?

I'll do it soon to add that feature to my own patches. Your procedure makes sense, but I don't think you need to create an ISO and then apply turnkey packages. You can do it all in the same script and finally generate an ISO (debian-tkl-core). 

The packages from the turnkey repos won't work out-of-the-box for sure. That means no tklpatch and no tklbam. And no (?).  But at least for tklpatch, it shouldn't be difficult to migrate the commands from the original appliance (they are just a bunch of scripts, based on other commands that should be available for installation) Of course a lot of test would need to be done. 

Please share your advancement and questions, I could help you out during the weekend. I'm pretty interested in a debian 64 bits tkl core. 

I've taken the package list from TurnKey Core and am working to reproduce this (minus the Turnkey custom packages) on a Squeeze 'net-install'.

This is pretty much just mindless hours of mixing and matching.

Once that is done and I create an iso from it then an overlay/patch could be created to apply the Turnkey packages and configuration.

As far as I can see this would NOT be compatible with tklbam-backup at this point.

That is where a base profile would be required.

You are far more experienced with tkl than I, does this make sense so far?

I would be interested in a Debian Squeeze core. What have you done so far? Are you writing a tklpatch? An official core may come this year, but I wouldn't expect it anytime soon. 

Once a core it's ready, the process of making the AMIs should be pretty straight-forward. I haven't make one myself, but I hope to make some images during this year. 

Try to make your tests and write down every command to a script. You don't need to share an ISO so others can play with it, you should (my recommendation and MHO of course) share a script, which can be applied to debian-netinstall. That way I can reproduce the creation of the base from an original debian ISO. 

I think mainly they don't work because they are not packaged (there are no .debs for debian). But otherwise, they should pretty much work installing the corresponding dependencies (you'll have to apt-cache show package-name to see the info about dependencies and such). dpkg -L package-name also gives you the list of files contained in the package. 

It's just a matter of doing some research. It could be easy accessing the source code for tklpatch/tklbam, but I'm not sure if they are available anyware. 

I'm also not sure what else does the TKL-Core installs from the TKL repos. I haven't done this research yet, but that should be a good starting point. 

The idea behind the custom Squeeze iso was to have a clean base to share with others who may want to play with it.

What in your opinion are the main causes of the tkl packages being incompatible with Squeeze? This will give me food for thought as I progress.

This will be rather slow going for me as I have been mostly involved with RHEL and clones for the past year. Even to the point of taking a couple of RedHat's grossly overpriced training classes.

Taking a while to wrap my head around Debian/Apt/Dpkg again. 🙂

Thanks much for the help.

OK, I'll start with a "bare-bones" net-install and document from there.

I have (recklessly/bravely) installed Ubuntu .debs on Debian and vice versa, so far pretty good luck there.

I'll check in when I have a decent start on this.

Good on you for having a look at this Don. I'd like to have a play with a 64bit Debian Squeeze Core so I'll be keen to hear of your progress.