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Created August 25, 2022 15:12
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debootstrap Ubuntu from Debian
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debootstrap_ubuntu_debian.md

Problem

You want to install a recent version of Ubuntu from Debian using debootstrap (say, from the Hetzner recovery OS) but you keep getting the following error:

base-files
E: Tried to extract package, but file already exists. Exit...

After consulting the debootstrap.log in the target, you find an error that looks similar to the following:

dpkg-deb: error: archive './/var/cache/apt/archives/base-files_12ubuntu4_arm64.deb' uses unknown compression for member 'control.tar.zst', giving up

Well, that's because dpkg in Debian doesn't support zstd compression, despite Debian bug #892664 being open since 2018 to add support.

Solution

Install dpkg from Ubuntu. zstd compression is supported and debootstrap will work. In this case, I used dpkg_1.19.7ubuntu3_arm64.deb because the latest version of dpkg from Ubuntu required a newer libc than was available in Debian:

root@rescue /tmp # dpkg -i dpkg_1.21.1ubuntu2_arm64.deb
dpkg: regarding dpkg_1.21.1ubuntu2_arm64.deb containing dpkg, pre-dependency problem:
 dpkg pre-depends on libc6 (>= 2.34)
  libc6:arm64 is installed, but is version 2.31-13+deb11u3.

Run debootstrap again and it should complete successfully.

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