Appendix D. Random Bits Note: If you want to have parts of the filesystem (e.g. /usr) mounted on separate partitions, you will need to create and mount these directories manually before proceding with the next stage. The utility used by the Ubuntu installer, and recognized as the official way to install an Ubuntu base system, is debootstrap . It uses wget and ar , but otherwise depends only on /bin/sh and basic Unix/Linux tools$^{2}$. Install wget and ar if they aren’t already on your current system, then download and install debootstrap . If these steps are executed under Ubuntu you can simply do this by apt install debootstrap . If you have an RPM (Red Hat Package Manager) based system, you can use alien, which is available in the Debian repositories, to convert the .deb file to a useable .rpm file. Or, you can use the following procedure to install it manually. Make a work folder for extracting the .deb into: The debootstrap binary is located in the Ubuntu archive (be sure to select the proper file for your architecture). Download the debootstrap .deb from the pool (http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports/pool/main/d/debootstrap/), copy the package to the work folder, and extract the files from it. You will need to have root privileges to install the files. debootstrap can download the needed files directly from the archive when you run it. You can substitute any Ubuntu archive mirror for ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports in the command example below, preferably a mirror close to you network-wise. Mirrors are listed at http://wiki.ubuntu.com/Archive. If you have an Ubuntu focal CD mounted at /cdrom , you could substitute a file URL instead of the http URL: file:/cdrom/ubuntu/ Substitute one of the following for ARCH in the debootstrap command: amd64 , arm64 , armhf , i386 , powerpc , ppc64el , or s390x . 2. These include the GNU core utilities and commands like sed , grep , tar and gzip . 112 D.4.3. Run debootstrap # ar -x debootstrap_0.X.X_all.deb # cd / # zcat /full-path-to-work/work/data.tar.gz | tar xv D.4.2. Install debootstrap # mkdir work # cd work # mkdir /mnt/ubuntu # mount /dev/ sda6 /mnt/ubuntu