Installation Howto
This document describes how to install &debian-gnu; &releasename; for
the &arch-title; (&architecture;
) with the
new &d-i;. It is a quick walkthrough of the installation process
which should contain all the information you will need for most installs.
When more information can be useful, we will link to more detailed
explanations in other parts of this document.
Preliminaries
If you encounter bugs during your install, please refer to
for instructions
on how to report them. If you have questions which cannot be
answered by this document, please direct them to the debian-boot
mailing list (&email-debian-boot-list;) or ask on IRC (#debian-boot
on the OFTC network).
Booting the installer
For some quick links to installation images, check out the
&d-i; home page.
The debian-cd team provides builds of installation images using &d-i; on the
Debian CD/DVD page.
For more information on where to get installation images, see .
Some installation methods require other images than those for optical media.
The &d-i; home page has links to
other images.
explains how to find images on &debian;
mirrors.
The subsections below will give the details about which images you should
get for each possible means of installation.
Optical disc
The netinst CD image is a popular image which can be used to install
&releasename; with the &d-i;. This installation method is intended to boot from the image and
install additional packages over a network; hence the name netinst
.
The image has the software components needed to run the installer and
the base packages to provide a minimal &releasename; system. If you'd
rather, you can get a full size CD/DVD image which will not need the network
to install. You only need the first image of such set.
Download whichever type you prefer and burn it to an optical disc.
To boot the disc, you may need to change your BIOS/UEFI
configuration, as explained in .
To boot a PowerMac from CD, press the c key while booting. See
for other ways to boot from CD.
USB memory stick
It's also possible to install from removable USB storage devices. For
example a USB keychain can make a handy &debian; install medium that you
can take with you anywhere.
The easiest way to prepare your USB memory stick is to download any
Debian CD or DVD image that will fit on it, and write the image directly
to the memory stick. Of course this will destroy anything already
on the stick. This works because Debian CD/DVD images are
isohybrid
images that can boot both from optical and USB drives.
The easiest way to prepare your USB memory stick is to download
hd-media/boot.img.gz, and use gunzip to extract the 1 GB
image from that file. Write this image directly to your memory stick, which
must be at least 1 GB in size. Of course this will destroy anything already
on the memory stick. Then mount the memory stick, which will now have a FAT
filesystem on it. Next, download a &debian; netinst CD image, and copy that file
to the memory stick; any filename is ok as long as it ends in
.iso.
There are other, more flexible ways to set up a memory stick to use the
debian-installer, and it's possible to get it to work with smaller memory
sticks. For details, see .
While booting from USB storage is quite common on UEFI systems, this is somewhat
different in the older BIOS world.
Some BIOSes can boot USB storage directly, and some cannot. You may need to
configure your BIOS/UEFI to enable
USB legacy support
or Legacy support
. The boot device
selection menu should show removable drive
or USB-HDD
to get it to boot from the USB device. For helpful
hints and details, see .
Booting from network
It's also possible to boot &d-i; completely from the net. The
various methods to netboot depend on your architecture and netboot setup.
The files in netboot/ can be used to netboot &d-i;.
The easiest thing to set up is probably PXE netbooting. Untar the
file netboot/pxeboot.tar.gz into
/srv/tftp or
wherever is appropriate for your tftp server. Set up your DHCP server to pass
filename pxelinux.0 to clients, and with luck
everything will just work.
For detailed instructions, see .
Booting from hard disk
It's possible to boot the installer using no removable media, but just an
existing hard disk, which can have a different OS on it. Download
hd-media/initrd.gz, hd-media/vmlinuz,
and a &debian; CD/DVD image to the top-level directory of the hard disk. Make sure
that the image has a filename ending in .iso. Now
it's just a matter of booting linux with the initrd.
explains one way to do it.
Installation
Once the installer starts, you will be greeted with an initial screen. Press
&enterkey; to boot, or read the instructions for other boot
methods and parameters (see ).
After a while you will be asked to select your language. Use the arrow keys
to pick a language and press &enterkey; to continue. Next you'll be asked to
select your country, with the choices including countries where your
language is spoken. If it's not on the short list, a list of all the
countries in the world is available.
You may be asked to confirm your keyboard layout. Choose the default unless
you know better.
Now sit back while debian-installer detects some of your hardware, and
loads the rest of the installation image.
Next the installer will try to detect your network hardware and set up
networking by DHCP. If you are not on a network or do not have DHCP, you
will be given the opportunity to configure the network manually.
Setting up the network is followed by the creation of user accounts. By
default you are asked to provide a password for the root
(administrator) account and information necessary to create one regular user
account. If you do not specify a password for the root
user, this
account will be disabled but the sudo package will be installed
later to enable administrative tasks to be carried out on the new system.
By default, the first user created on the system will be allowed to use the
sudo command to become root.
The next step is setting up your clock and time zone. The installer will
try to contact a time server on the Internet to ensure the clock is set
correctly. The time zone is based on the country selected earlier and the
installer will only ask to select one if a country has multiple zones.
Now it is time to partition your disks. First you will be given the
opportunity to automatically partition either an entire drive, or available
free space on a drive (see ).
This is recommended for new users or anyone in a hurry. If you do not want
to autopartition, choose Manual from the menu.
If you have an existing Windows partition that you want to preserve,
be very careful with automatic partitioning. If you choose manual partitioning,
you can use the installer to resize existing FAT or NTFS partitions to create
room for the &debian; install: simply select the partition and specify its new size.
On the next screen you will see your partition table, how the partitions will
be formatted, and where they will be mounted. Select a partition to modify or
delete it. If you did automatic partitioning, you should just be able to choose
Finish partitioning and write changes to disk
from the menu to use what it set up. Remember to assign at least one partition
for swap space and to mount a partition on /.
For more detailed information on how to use the partitioner, please refer
to ; the appendix has more general information about
partitioning.
Now &d-i; formats your partitions and starts to install the base system,
which can take a while. That is followed by installing a kernel.
The base system that was installed earlier is a working, but very minimal
installation. To make the system more functional the next step allows you
to install additional packages by selecting tasks. Before packages can be
installed apt needs to be configured as that defines
from where the packages will be retrieved.
The Standard system
task will be selected by default and
should normally be installed. Select the Desktop environment
task if you would like to have a graphical desktop after the installation.
See for additional information about this step.
The last step is to install a boot loader. If the installer detects
other operating systems on your computer, it will add them to the boot menu
and let you know.
By default GRUB will be installed to the UEFI partition/boot
record of the primary drive, which is generally a good choice. You'll be
given the opportunity to override that choice and install it elsewhere.
&d-i; will now tell you that the installation has
finished. Remove the cdrom or other boot media and hit &enterkey; to reboot
your machine. It should boot up into the newly installed system and
allow you to log in. This is explained in .
If you need more information on the install process, see
.
Send us an installation report
If you successfully managed an installation with &d-i;,
please take time to provide us with a report.
The simplest way to do so is to install the reportbug package
(apt install reportbug), configure
reportbug as explained in
, and run
reportbug installation-reports.
If you did not complete the install, you probably found a bug in
debian-installer. To improve the installer it is necessary that we know
about them, so please take the time to report them. You can use an
installation report to report problems; if the install completely fails,
see .
And finally…
We hope that your &debian; installation is pleasant and that you find &debian;
useful. You might want to read .