Debian jessie bootstrap
Background
These instructions assume you are starting from the image located at http://bunniefoo.com/xobs/novena-recovery-image.img.gz , and you are intending to install Jessie to an attached SATA hard drive.
This is a low-level dd image that includes bootloader and partition table with a recovery image, and it's meant to target a 4GiB microSD card. You can create the image by doing
zcat novena-recovery-image.img.gz | sudo dd of=/dev/sdX bs=1M
To activate the recovery image, you must hold down the "user" button while powering on or resetting the board, otherwise the system will attempt to boot from the attached hard drive.
Bootstrap
After booting into the recovery image, create your target filesystem using mkfs.ext4, and mount the respective partition at, for our example purposes, /mnt
Run debootstrap
debootstrap jessie /mnt
After completion you'll need to install a minimal set of networking protocols for the next step:
Install bluetooth:
Install network manager:
Copy over config files:
cp /var/lib/bluetooth /mnt/var/lib/bluetooth cp /etc/X11/Xorg.conf /mnt/etc/X11/Xorg.conf cp /etc/NetworkManager/system/connections /mnt/etc/NetworkManager/system/connections