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>
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