Ubuntu – commands of the netinstall mini.iso documented

command linedocumentationsystem-installationubuntu-minimal

I've tried to install a new system with the help of a mini.iso and ran into wireless configuration issues.
I found it pretty weird that the mini.iso mostly seems to be working fine although despite pretty basic commands like the following:

lshw
lspci
lsusb
ifconfig

were missing when I tried them from the command line.

This is the extended version of my question:

  • Which commands are available on the mini.iso?
  • Where can I find documentation about the available console commands?
  • Where can I find what software packages are present on the mini.iso?

Update: (clarification about the question)

To be clear about the question: with "command line" I mean the console that becomes available when you

  • perform "manual" configuration steps during setup (like wireless, disk, serial device setup) or

  • when you access the menu point "Execute a shell"

The question is specific about the mini.iso or netinstall.iso as these are provided seemingly without further documentation. This is not a question about what is generally available under busybox (or any other mini Linux distro). If the shell on the mini.iso is based on busybox, I'd like to see where this fact is documented.

The question is not just about the above four commands. It's about where to get documentation about what is available as commands.

Some years ago, there used to be documentation about this. And documentation about how to configure devices during install. These seem to be gone without replacement.

Best Answer

There is no documentation because:

  1. Developers hate writing documentation
  2. It's kind of self-documenting:

    The mini.iso can be mounted with:

    mkdir /media/DVD-ISO
    sudo mount -o loop /tmp/mini.iso /media/DVD-ISO
    

    Now you can inspect the data of the iso itself:

    ll /media/DVD-ISO
    

    and it contains a number of files, of which one is of particular interest:

    -r--r--r-- 2 root root  21M Apr 15  2014 initrd.gz
    

    which is a gzip compressed file which we extract like this:

    cd /media/DVD-ISO/
    mkdir initrd
    cd initrd
    gunzip ../initrd.gz
    

    Which finally give us the boot image initrd which we extract using:

    mkdir temp
    cd temp
    sudo cpio -id < ../initrd
    

And now you have all the updated documentation you need! (answering your questions one by one)

  1. This gives the full list of commands included in the iso: ll bin&ll sbin&ll usr/local/bin
  2. Just type man szCommand where szCommand is the command whose documentation you want.
  3. See step 1 as there are no additional packages present...
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