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by regularfry 3883 days ago
When I've done this sort of thing in the past, the ability to work with a set of staged partial images was a very mixed blessing. It ended up being over-complicated and rarely taken advantage of. I've settled on local package repositories and a single image build step which compiles everything together.

The latter problem you describe, that of needing to be root, goes away if you don't use a loopback device but instead use a mountable filesystem image. `truncate -d1G os.img && mkfs.ext3 os.img && mount os.img mountpoint/` doesn't need root at any point.