System installation

This page has been verified for a debian 11 (bullseye) installation (official install guide). It should work for other versions too.

• Remember to do a backup of everything that may be important on the target computer, as the installation may overwrite stuff.
• Get a debian image and burn it on a usb stick (may be done from a different system):
  • Download a debian image from https://www.debian.org/download. Usually the netinst image is a good choice as it is a small image which will download required packages during the installation.
  • Plug in the usb stick and find its device name (e.g. /dev/sdc). Be careful and triple-check otherwise you may end up overwriting a different disk.
  • Burn the image to a usb stick: dd if={path to the image file} of={the usb device (triple-check this)} status=progress conv=fsync

Additional firmware

During the installation, messages may appear about "missing firmware" (that often happens with the network card firmware). In that case, the missing firmware can be provided via an additional usb stick ("Loading Missing Firmware" chapter from the official documentation).

• Download the firmware archive (zip/tar) from https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/firmware/.
  • If the necessary firmware is not in this archive, additional firmware packages can be found at https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=firmware. They can be added alongside the contents of the archive.
• Extract the archive to a usb stick: the files should be either at the root of the drive or inside a firmware directory placed at the root of the drive.
  • Make sure that the folder and its contents are global-readable.
• Insert the usb stick when asked by the installer (before boot works as well).
• The debian installer should automatically pick up the firmware

Bug in older versions(bug report). The installer could fail to detect the firmware if the usb was created with a partition table.
In that case, a workaround is to format the usb containing the firmware without a partition table by running mkfs.vfat -I {usb device without patition number (e.g. /dev/sdX)}.

Wifi networks

In previous versions of the debian installer, there was a bug that did not allow to connect to WPA-encrypted wifi networks. In that case, switching to a non-encrypted (open) network or a wired connection was needed.

Error log

The graphical installers logs errors to one of the text terminals, which can be shown with ctrl+alt+F1 to F6.