I've recently made releases of vmdb2 and v-i. vmdb2 is my tool for creating a disk image with Debian installed. It's useful for making virtual machine images. Gunnar Wolf uses it to build Raspberry Pi Debian images. Earlier this month I released version 0.28, with a lot of changes, mostly by other people. vmdb2 has been working for me for many years now.

v-i is my installer for Debian. It installs Debian on bare metal PCs. I've been using it now for a couple of years, and I like it, but I don't know if it works for anyone else. I wrote v-i because I wanted a non-interactive, repeatable, and fast installation method. While the first install now takes around five minutes for me, subsequent ones take around a minute and a half. I need to give one command to start the installation, and then one to reboot the machine into the installed system.

Grossly simplifying:

• vmdb2 = parted + mkfs + debootstrap + grub + some config & logic
• v-i = vmdb2 + Ansible + some config & logic

At a very high level, both are very simple tools, mostly relying on other, more magical tools. At the nitty gritty detail level, both deal with sufficiently esoteric parts of an operating system (especially boot loaders) to be awful to develop and debug. But they now work for me.

Maybe they might work for you, too?