Boot fix:
- Ship proven Debian Live MBR (4552) as branding/isohdpfx.bin — the
ISOLINUX package MBR (33ed) doesn't boot on all hardware. This was
the root cause of "machine doesn't pick up the USB".
Branding:
- Custom GRUB background: pixel-art floating island (1024x574)
- Archipelago pixel-art logo for Plymouth boot splash
- GRUB theme: dark background, orange selected item, no broken font refs
- Plymouth theme: script-based with progress bar, LUKS prompt support
- Plymouth + splash added to target rootfs packages
- GRUB theme installed on both installer ISO and target system
- Serial console (ttyS0) added to kernel params for QEMU debugging
CI improvements:
- Smoke test step: mounts ISO, verifies all critical files, checks
initrd has live-boot, confirms boot=live in grub.cfg. Fails build
before copying to Builds if any check fails.
Dev workflow:
- dev-branding.sh: extract ISO, swap branding, repackage, boot in QEMU
(~10 seconds vs 20 min full rebuild)
- generate-grub-background.py: procedural cyberpunk background generator
- generate-plymouth-logo.py: procedural logo generator
- Improved test-iso-qemu.sh: --bios/--nographic flags, serial logging
Build:
- Simplified live-boot install (clean chroot, no complex fallbacks)
- Static branding images preferred, generators as fallback
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Theme: remove explicit font name references that don't match
grub-mkfont output names, remove select_*.png pixmap reference
(files don't exist). GRUB falls back to default when theme fails
to load — this was causing the Debian helmet to show.
QEMU test script: add --bios/--nographic flags, serial console
logging to /tmp/archipelago-qemu-serial.log, auto-detect latest
ISO, use -drive for OVMF firmware.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Major ISO build overhaul on dev-iso branch:
- Replace ~800MB Debian Live download with debootstrap --variant=minbase
(~150MB installer squashfs built from scratch)
- Custom initramfs with archipelago-mount hook for boot media detection
- Systemd service auto-starts installer (replaces profile.d hack)
- GRUB + ISOLINUX configs written from scratch (no Debian Live dependency)
- EFI boot image built with grub-mkimage (no more MBR extraction)
- Archipelago GRUB theme: dark background, Bitcoin orange accents
- Theme installed on both installer ISO and target system
- Rootfs optimizations: --no-install-recommends, strip docs/man/locales,
remove firmware-misc-nonfree/wget/htop, add explicit font deps
- Separate CI workflow (build-iso-dev.yml) for dev-iso branch
- Includes pre-existing fixes from main (build-iso.yml, middleware, Login)
Target: sub-2GB unbundled ISO (down from 3.9GB)
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
