How To Easily Install Debian Unstable

so obviously I'm a big fan of Arch Linux I use Arch based distributions primarily at least here in the last few years and a lot of viewers of the channel complain that this channel is too Arch Centric hey can you do some Debian content well you know what my second favorite Linux distribution is it's actually Debian so why don't we install Debian today and in fact I'm going to show you my preferred method of installing Debian and that is by using their mini ISO they have a little tiny mini ISO and the reason I like the mini ISO is because it's small but it also has a lot of choice you can do an expert installation where you go in and you pick and choose what you want to install including whether you want to run Debian stable testing or unstable and today I'm going to run through a quick installation of Debian using the mini ISO and I'm going to install Debian unstable code named Sid so I'm going to run through this installation using a virtual machine I gave this virtual machine 6 gigs of RAM I gave it about 20 G gabt of space and I'm going to go instead of choosing the install option which is the first option here in the boot menu I'm going to go into advanced options and the reason is because I want to install Debian unstable rather than the standard Debian Edition which is Debian stable so if I go into advanced options and I go into expert install it launches the traditional Debian in curses installer now for those of you that are longtime Linux users you probably use this Debian in curses install in the past it's very easy to use but if you're new to it don't worry it's pretty self-explanatory the very first thing you need to do obviously is choose a language so let's go ahead for me I'm choosing English in the list it is correctly chosen English for me already so I just need to hit enter uh United States English is what I need and then country to base default local also the US now this screen here don't get confused it's asking for additional locals other than the one you chose on the previous screen so I already chose English us for the local so I don't need to choose additional locals if you need to choose them obviously choose them in this list but for me I'm going to hit the uh Tab Key to get to the continue button over here that's how I got continue highlighted in red and then I just click continue next is access software for blind person using a braille display I don't have any kind of visual disabilities so I don't need this so I'm going to skip this and go to configure the keyboard and for keyboard American English is the key map for me it's already there so I just need to hit enter next detect Network hardware and it's asking about the following Linux kernel modules were detected as matching your Hardware it's already selected USB storage uh let me go ahead and click enter on that next up is configuring the network if I hit enter do I want to autoc configure networking usually you want to just hit yes please enter the maximum time you would like for Network link detection by default it looks like it is set to 3 seconds I guess that would be okay and it's going to go ahead and set up IP V6 auto configuration it just does all this automatically for you there's really nothing for you to do again this uh Debian in curses installer is pretty self-explanatory finally we need to set up a host name for this machine I'm going to call this Dean DVM so if I ever SSH into the machine I know it's deian and I know it's a virtual machine not a physical machine let me hit tab to get over to the continue button and hit enter domain name I don't necessarily have to enter a domain name so I'll just skip that part and then choose the mirror of the Debian archive so please select the protocol to be used by default it will choose HTTP but if you want to you can choose https or FTP as well I'm going to go with the default HTTP select your mirror country I'm in the US so let me click on us the Debian archive mirror which one should we use I'm going to go with with the default deb. debian.org the first in the list next up setting up a HTTP proxy if you don't need this you just leave it blank so I'm just going to tab over to continue and hit enter choose a mirror for the Debian archive so this is where you choose whether you want the standard Debian stable which you know 95% of people that install Debian they probably want to be on Debian stable but if you want a more rolling release version of Debian then testing is the way to go or if you really want to be on the bleeding edge of things unstable is a very bleeding edge rolling release version of Debian and this is Sid I'm going to go ahead and install Debian Sid which is the unstable Branch next is download installer components so let me hit enter and we get a very large list of things that we could choose to install now being that this is just a virtual machine I really don't need to install anything extra I'm not going to keep this virtual machine around but if I wanted to I can go in here and install you know various packages here for example CD ROM Checker CD ROM detect Fisk udab which is manually partition a drive using F disc ISO scan the live installer yada yada yada I'm not going to install any of this extra stuff uh just to make this install very quick so I'm just going to go ahead and tab over and hit enter on continue and it's loading additional components which of course I didn't check anything off in the list so this will just be the base components that Debian is going to always install next next up set up users and password so if you choose not to allow root to log in then a user account will be created and given the power to become root using sudu so do you want to allow login as root if you choose yes you'll have a root user and you'll also have your normal user if you choose no which is what I'm going to do then your home user will have pseudo privileges so I'm going to choose no next up let's go ahead and create our user account I'm going to call my user DT tab over hit continue his username is already chosen as DT tab over hit continue then let's choose a strong and complicated password for the DT user and then tab over and hit continue and then re-enter the strong and complicated password and then tab over and hit continue next up configuring the clock and set the clock using ntp that's the default I'm going to go with the default ntp server to use I'm just going to go with their default tab over hit continue next choosing your time zone I'm in the central time zone in the US so let me choose that detect the Dis Let's go ahead and hit enter and let's see if it automatically detects the virtual hard drive in this virtual machine and then partition disk and yeah it's setting up some stuff here starting up the partitioner and do I want to do the guided partition so the automatic partitioning I'm just going to let Debian do its thing so it will create a partition for the main partition and a boot partition if it needs it whatever it needs to do just let Debian do an autom automatic partitioning or do I want to do manual partitioning I'm going to do the automatic so I'm just going to do the guided and it's correctly chosen the virtual hard drive in this virtual machine there's only one drive so it really didn't have anything else to choose and then the partition scheme you've got a few choices here you can do all files in one partition which is what I'm going to do because this virtual machine is kind of tied on Space it makes sense to do everything in just one partition but if you wanted to you can separate out the home partition or you can have a separate selection slome /var and SLT partition you could also do a separate /var and/ SRV partition as well as well as a swap and you can also do what they call small dis less than 10 GB of a partitioning scheme I'm going to choose the first option all files in one partition and then we get a summary of what it's about to do to our Drive everything looks okay so I'm just going to go ahead and click on finish partitioning and write changes to dis and then one more time for confirmation choose yes and the reason it add so many times do you really want to do this it's because it's about to format the drive and wipe the disc right so you got to make sure that you really want to install this operating system to this disc I really do next up install the base system let me hit enter on that and this may take a couple of minutes and while it was installing the base packages it does ask which kernel do I want that's interesting that it gives us various kernel choices I'm going to go with the default uh which is Linux image amd64 next up is drivers to include in the anit Rd so do you want to do the generic which includes all available drivers so it's going to be much larger in space or do you want to do targeted only include drivers needed for the system it had generic as the default setting that's the one I'm going to choose but if you wanted to just do the targeted that's an option next is configure the package manager of course that's the APT package manager do you want to use nonfree firmware the default answer is yes and unless you have a real reason to answer no to this question you probably want to answer this yes because uh many machines are not going to run without some nonfree firmware so I'm going to enter yes do I want to use non-free software now you can choose no to this if you want to but once again answering yes is probably the safe play here and enable Source repositories in apt hit yes and it's configuring the APT package manager next is Select and install software so let's go ahead and choose this now it says applying updates on a frequent basis is an important part of keeping the system secure yada yada yada do you want updates Management on this system so do you want to do automatic updates or do you want to handle that yourself so by default it's no automatic updates you just update the system yourself that's actually what I want but if you wanted to uh you could install security updates automatically I'm going to go no automatic updates though and then finally popularity contest so this is the popcon program uh it does some analytics uh it helps the uh Debi and divs uh know a little bit about your installation it helps the development of Debian so do you want to participate in the survey it's turned off by default which is a nice touch but you know for me I don't mind participating in the survey if I was doing this on physical uh Hardware I would actually answer this question yes in this VM it doesn't matter so I'll click no and it says at the moment only the core of the system is installed so do you want to install you know other stuff like a desktop environment so I actually do by default it's going to install gnome makes sense it's Debian right but for me I do not want gnome so I'm actually going to turn that off so I'm going to hit the space bar to tag that off and I'm going to go down to xfce and turn xfce on now if this was a server you may also want to install a web server like Apache or engine X or SSH if you plan on sshing into the machine it's nice to have the SSH server on the machine as well for me I'm going to leave all that stuff ticked off I'm going to tab over to continue and hit enter now one thing I'm not sure about xfce does not come with a uh display manager out of the box as far as a login manager so is it going to install one is Debian smart enough to know that and install something like light DM or gdm for me or will I have to go after the fact and install a login manager myself we'll see again I'm not sure on that now this portion of the installation and has taken a few minutes and I've been paying attention to the uh package list it's installing a lot of stuff a lot of desktop applications it's installing the full Library office suite and I did notice it will install Light DM as a login manager so that answers that question next up is installing the grub bootloader I'm just going to hit enter on that I imagine this is just going to be an automatic process I may have to choose what partition to install it to and it says grub can use OS prober to attempt to detect other operating systems on your computer and add them to the list of boot options so if you're dual booting along other operating systems you probably want to run this for me I don't need to do this so I'm just going to choose no here and it just installed grub do you want to install the grub bootloader to your primary drive the default answer is yes I'm going to go with that uh what is the default drive it's /dev vda in my case and on physical Hardware instead of vda it'll probably be SDA or in em whatever kind of drive you have and then finally finish the installation let's go ahead and hit enter on that next up setting up the system clock is the system clock set to UTC the default answer is yes I'm going to go ahead and hit yes on that uh and it says installation complete please choose continue to reboot so let's reboot and see if our installation was successful and it looks like our installation was successful because I get a grub menu so uh if you don't get a grub menu that's something bad happen right so if you get a grub menu usually your Linux installation went well now the next major test is do I actually get light DM the login manager to appear or are we going to have an issue with our display server here eventually of course I need to see either a login manager or I need to just be booted directly into xfce uh I've been on this screen here for a few seconds now so it's starting to scare me yeah I've been stuck on the screen for a little bit so let me actually get out of this uh could I switch to a different TTY it looks like the whole thing is locked up I can't even switch to a different TTY so what I'm going to do I'm going to force this virtual machine off and let's start it again and let's see if we get a little bit better look this time maybe it was just an issue with that very first reboot no it's going to go to the same screen oh but things start loading I'm actually getting all the system D start jobs so yeah and I get to my login manager so it was just that first automatic reboot didn't work but when I manually rebooted the virtual machine it worked just fine let's go ahead and enter our username and our super secure password and let's see if we get our xfce desktop environment yes this is very much vanilla xfce it's very ugly right but this is xfce let me open the default terminal in xfce of course the xfce terminal and uh let me go ahead and do a x rander command so XR and R let's just verify what resolutions I have for the drivers in the spiritual machine I am using the vert iio video driver in this vert machine and you can see 1920 x 1080 is an available resolution so I'm going to do xranger space- s for set 1920 by 1080 and now I have set the screen resolution to 1920 by 1080 I should be fine on this going forward every time I log in hopefully it should remember xfce that I want 1920 by 1080 so let's verify that we're actually on Deb and unstable rather than S if I open up a terminal let's go ahead and open the xfc terminal I'm going to zoom in the easiest way to verify if you're on a rolling release is check the kernel version you name- R I am on kernel version 6.2.3 that is a very recent kernel release that's actually ahead of what I'm on on Arco Linux I'm using uh 6121 on Arco Linux but I haven't updated in a couple of days so I may have 6123 available for me on Arco if I did an update but obviously we're definitely on a rolling release Dro here so this is going to be very different from your grandfather's Debian right this is not Debian stable this is not old crusty Rock Solid stable there could be some breakage with running Debian unstable you can see it comes with a full Suite of software I'm not going to go through all the software but it has the full Libre Office Suite fir Fox it had a bunch of multimedia stuff lot of accessories all the xfce utilities of course thunar the file manager and all that you got couple of terminals installed as well so you got a nice good Suite of desktop applications and for me you know if I wanted to run a rolling release distribution and Debian I know that's kind of strange because most people associate Dean with Debian stable but if you want Debian and you want a little excitement with Debian Maybe use the testing Branch or in my case use the unstable Branch I'm using the unstable Branch known as Sid and if you want to do that the easiest way to install the unstable branch is probably do it the way I just did with the mini ISO because there's no official unstable ISO because it's constantly rolling they don't put out isos for unstable if you want to install Debian as the unstable brand you really need to do it with the mini ISO they do have isos for the testing Branch now they do occasionally put out testing is and of course they have the stable ISO as well for those that want the traditional kind of LTS you know stable version of deian that so many of us love now before I go I need to thank a few special people I need to thank the producers of this episode Matt James Steve armor Dragon daroff datalist gdr George Lee Matthew methos Aran Paul peor reality foress red profit Rolland solry t r War twin abtu and Willie these guys they're my highest tiered patrons over on patreon without these guys this quick installation of Debbie and unstable would not have been possible the show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen all these names you're seeing on the screen right now these are all my supporters over on patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors I'm sponsored by you guys the community if you like my work want to see more videos about Linux and free and open source software subscribe to Dro tube over on patreon peace guys