Debian installation

last modified

2025–8–25

Fresh installation of Debian 12, on elektra on 2023–6–25, on sydney on 2023–8–11, and on PFSNSQ859196 on 2024–5–26.

Debian installer

Copy netinst installation image on USB stick:
```
cp debian-12.0.0-amd64-netinst.iso /dev/sdX
```
Restart, and select the USB stick as boot device from BIOS (F12).
Preserve configuration files, e.g. zip /etc to a location where it is preserved.
In the installer, select English language, US location, and German keyboard. Ignore the timezone for now.
On a laptop, select the WiFi network. Get the password e.g. from Android under ‘Share’. Keep the domain name mynet.
Simplest partitioning: Delete all Linux partitions which do not contain user data, use guided partitioning, use the largest contiguous free space, all files in one partition.
Select deb.debian.org as package server. Select the tasks
- SSH server (task-ssh-server)
- standard system utilities (tasksel install standard)
Do not select KDE Plasma or any other desktop environment, because they pull in all kinds of stuff. task-laptop does not have to be selected because it is automatically installed on a laptop.
Reboot.

Basic setup

Log in as root on a virtual console.
Make the Linux console usable by running
```
dpkg-reconfigure console-setup
```
and choosing ‘UTF-8’, ‘Latin-1’, ‘Terminus’, and ‘16x32’ or ‘14x28’ depending on the screen resolution.
Fix the timezone by
```
dpkg-reconfigure tzdata
```
Add user(s) to sudo group:
```
adduser <username> sudo
```
Install a sane editor: joe (or just use nano)
Make sure all available Debian package repositories and sections are configured. /etc/apt/sources.list should look like
```
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ bookworm main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security bookworm-security main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ bookworm-updates main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ bookworm-backports main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
```
The backports repository has by default a lower precendence than the other repositories, which means no upgrades to packages from it will be performed automatically. This can be fixed by creating /etc/apt/preferences.d/99debian-backports with the content
```
Package: *
Pin: release n=bookworm-backports
Pin-Priority: 500
```
Caution

However, this may break installation from the regular repositories. It may be better to keep the low precedence and only install from backports as needed.
Install aptitude & update:
```
apt install aptitude
aptitude safe-upgrade
```
At this point, regular packages may be replaced by higher versions from backports.

KDE installation and system configuration

Install KDE via packages plasma-desktop and sddm, plus konsole and dolphin.
On a laptop, network-manager is useful. Install it and plasma-nm, and make sure that the WiFi configuration in /etc/network/interfaces (left over from the installation) is commented out, so that WiFi is managed by NetworkManager.

Otherwise, make sure that network-manager and plasma-nm are not installed.
Reboot into KDE.

KDE ‘System Settings’

In Regional Settings / Region & Language
- set Language to ‘American English’
- set Measurements to ‘C (Metric)’
- set Paper Size to ‘C (A4)’.
- set Time to “English (Sweden)” for ISO date format and 24 h clock.
  This is really necessary only for Dolphin.
In principle, a system locale en_SE.UTF-8 is generated and active from the next reboot, but that doesn’t seem to work; among other things, Aptitude (Perl-based?) complains.
Instead, apart from KDE we use the locale en_DK.UTF-8 for time, which however has to be explicitly generated with
```
sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales
```
Keep en_US.UTF-8, disable en_SE.UTF-8, and enable en_DK.UTF-8.
Then set LC_TIME=en_DK.UTF-8 in ~/.bashrc.
In Applications / Locations, set all unwanted locations to the home directory. This information is stored in .config/user-dirs.dirs.

Make sure wanted locations (e.g. Downloads) actually exist, then run xdg-user-dirs-update.

Delete the old, automatically generated folders.
```
cd
rmdir Desktop Documents Downloads Videos Pictures Music Public Templates
```
In Input Devices / Keyboard / Advanced select:
- Layout of numeric keypad: Unicode arrows and math operators on default level (keypad:future)
- Non-breaking space input: Non-breaking space at the 3rd level (nbsp:level3)
- Position of Compose key: Caps Lock (compose:caps)

Nvidia drivers

Install nvidia-driver, and reboot.

Further installation and configuration

Install further packages, e.g.

ark bc colorized-logs copyq curl ddcutil djview4 dolphin-plugins encfs exim4 firefox-esr fuse-zip gh gimp git htop inkscape ipython3 jq kcharselect kcolorchooser kde-spectacle kmag latexmk locate meld minify mpv mpv-mpris mricron mutt net-tools pavucontrol pdftk picard pipx pkexec poppler-utils qcomicbook qdirstat qttools5-dev-tools redshift remmina ripgrep sqlitebrowser terminator texlive-xetex tidy tree ttf-mscorefonts-installer wmctrl xclip xdotool

Synchronize the Configlibrary via Seafile.
From ~/Config/dot, run ./install and sudo ./install.
Install fonts from ~/Config/Fonts.
Configure Konsole, Terminator, and other applications which need a monospace font to use Consolas at 15pt.