Always use the unstable version of live-build in your host build machine. At the time of writing this means version 3.0~a67-1. You can grab the one-off .deb here: http://packages.debian.org/sid/live-build ### Errors when building flat ("plain") filesystem images NOTE: these problems should have been fixed by removing the rootfs stage from caching? When building a chroot-filesystem=none image, if you encounter: cp: cannot create regular file `binary/live/filesystem.packages': No such file or directory You will need to: mkdir binary/live rm -rf cache/binary_rootfs If you don't run the second line as well, you will get the error: cp: cannot stat `cache/binary_rootfs/filesystem.*': No such file or directory ### Missing symlinked files If you get a boot error like: Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init! Then init may be unable to link to necessary library (like lib/ld-linux.so.3), because of some badness in the binary build system. Try overcoming with: lb clean --binary lb config lb binary_chroot lb binary_rootfs lb binary_hdd ### mksquashfs Segfaults in qemu mksquashfs always segfaults when run inside of qemu. Perhaps due to large memory requirements of mksquashfs? One hack workaround is to install the squashfs-tools in the host build system, then edit the file /usr/lib/live/build/binary_rootfs and around line 377 comment out: Chroot chroot "mksquashfs chroot filesystem.squashfs ${MKSQUASHFS_OPTIONS}" and insert: cd chroot mksquashfs chroot filesystem.squashfs ${MKSQUASHFS_OPTIONS} cd .. Previously tried adding the following mksquashfs arguments, but they didn't fix the problem: export MKSQUASHFS_OPTIONS="-processors 1 -read-queue 8 -write-queue 16 -fragment-queue 8" ### squashfs image too small The Calculate_partition_size function seems to be too optimistic; sometimes images will not fit in the generated partitions. Add the following below line 132 of /usr/lib/live/build/binary_hdd in your host environment to add an extra 50MB to the partition size (probably way more than necessary): DU_DIM="$(echo 50 + $DU_DIM | bc)"