How to install Debian 7.1 wheezy

Wednesday, 24 July 2013 Posted in Blog

A tutorial on how to install the latest Debian linux Operating system, Debian wheezy 7.1 .

First you will need the following :


  1. A computer...............

  2. The debian CD image, a brief explanation on that follows.


Debian always has two releases, the "testing", regenerated weekly, and the one we want, the "stable", official stable release like the name says. We are getting the CD image for i386 processor architecture, this is to say for a normal Intel/AMD processor, a 32bits operating system, on this link:

http://cdimage.debian.org/mirror/cdimage/archive/7.1.0/i386/jigdo-cd/debian-7.1.0-i386-CD-1.jigdo

You can see in the link above there are several cd's, we only need the first one, the rest is for packages that you wont need on the begining and you can get online later.

In case you want to install 64bits operating system, you need to get amd64, not to confuse whit amd processor specific, it is also for Intel/AMD :

http://cdimage.debian.org/mirror/cdimage/archive/7.1.0/amd64/jigdo-cd/debian-7.1.0-amd64-CD-1.jigdo

All the files above are jigdo files, after downloading the CD files go to,debian jigdo how to.
Here you'll learn how to use it to get the CDs.
To keep in mind, this installation is going to be done has being in the United Kingdom, so you need to adjust that acordingly, the computer is an ordinary intel I5 cpu if that matters, there is only one HDD which i will use entirely.



Starting :

We start by putting our CD into the cd tray and configure the BIOS to startup with the cd drive first, that differs a lot from PC to PC but generically you can find it, more and less under boot sequence.
You will then see the following screen, and we will go to, Graphical install.



Next we will chose the language .

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Then country.



Then we chose our keyboard, i prefer american english.



Then we have the hostname, i call it the computer name and im calling it tutorials, so when in a command line you will get a prompt like this,tonto@tutorials:~$, tonto is the user loged in at the moment.



Next we define the domain name, we are not gona touch this right now, we can always modify it later, we'll just leave it empty for now.



Now we need to define the password for the user root, this is very important since this is the superuser of this operating system, root is God.



Now we are going to create our user account, Our full name for this account, you can later add more or even erase this one, but you always need at least one, its not recommended to work with user root, you dont want to mess with God. For now my user account is gona be called Tonto, Loneranger loyal indian friend.



Above we created our user account, now we need the login name for this user account, no capital letters and one single word,its usually the same as the name of the user account, debian even does it for you, so we will let him do what he does best, and leave it.



Again password, this time for the user you just created.



Now we reach the fun part, Partitioning, but we will keep it really simple. For that we first chose, Guided Partitioning.



And we will use the entire disk.



Here we chose which disk to use, in this case i only have one, and yes im using virtualbox for this tutorial.



Again to keep simple, we are going to have only one partition, we could have diferent partitions for your personal files for example independent from the partition with the OS.



Two partitions were created automatically, the root partition /, and the swap.
Finish and write changes.



Confirm the changes to the disk.



I mentioned in the beginning that we were only going to use one CD, in this step its asked if we want to read other CD's, we say no.

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We want now to configure a network mirror where we will in the future get all our software, updates, etc.



We will chose the nearest mirror country to our location.



Inside each country there are several Debian servers, in the case of the UK, Debian is showing us 16. Again chose the most near and reliable to you.



Now we chose a proxy to reach the outside network, if your home just leave it blank.



Here you chose if you wana participate on the packages survey by Debian developers, if you are a good lad, press yes.



We have the base system set, we can leave it or add some software, and we want a, Debian desktop environment, which with this CD will be GNOME 2 desktop, i chose the print server, an ssh server so i can access my computer thru a shell from a secure internet connection and the standard system stuff.



Now we need to install the Bootloader called GRUB, on the harddrive, this will start after the BIOS and start the OS, we defenetly want this.



We are finished, remove CD and reboot by pressing continue.



After rebooting we get to the bootloader GRUB we installed last, we have two options, normal and recovery mode, lets do normal. Also notice if you dont chose anything after 10 seconds, it will chose the first option by default, you can change time and default option later.



One final step, you need to chose here, as shown by the arrow inside the red rectangle, gnome classic, otherwise you will get an empty desktop.



That is it. ENJOY :)
Your nice cool Debian Linux Operating System.



Any questions, fill free to comment below.