A Special Debian Install

Here I am installing Debian 11 with btrfs, timeshift, i3, zram and timeshift-autosnap.
To activate Wifi after reboot use wpa_supplicant as described here: unix.stackexchange.com/questi...
You can also install Network Manager, enable it and use nmtui to connect to wifi.
Enjoy the video!
timeshift-autosnap-apt: github.com/wmutschl/timeshift...
Become a member of the channel to support it:
/ @eflinux
** Follow Me on Twitter: bit.ly/3gKkPeR **
My software:
Distro: Arch Linux
Video editing software: Kdenlive
Twitter: / ermanno_ferrari
Gitlab: gitlab.com/eflinux
#linuxmadesimple

[@eflinux]

For instructions on how to configure WiFi with wpa_supplicant, please check the video description.

[@diver_ua]

If you using different wifi networks - for installed system NetworkManager is more convenient (and it can be configured in terminal using nmtui command)

[@eflinux]

@@diver_ua it’s in the video description.

[@jaybee2609]

Much appreciated guide bud . Worked flawless. Top job :) I been wanted a good stable base for a debian system and now I can try i3 which I never have before. Thanks again.

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Awesome video and so nice to see Debian getting some more love! :)

[@dezmondwhitney1208]

I could understand what you did from beginning to end as your demonstration was so clear . A Great Video . Many Thanks.

[@peppe540]

Thanks Ermanno, great video. I will apply this to LMDE, adding a Xanmod kernel on the way. Of course LMDE uses their own installer so it's a little more straightforward in adding btrfs. But a ton of valuable information from you again!

[@MichaelJHathaway]

Do not install Xanmod or Liquorix kernels. You will introduce instability which will far out weight the very subtle gain you will receive. Use Sid instead and make it auto update. I have a tutorial on this at ezlinux.

[@trapspringer9891]

Thank you for this fantastic video. I love your Arch installs, I have learned so much. This is a very welcome addition to my library of knowledge.

[@cezarcj9357]

This video is great, Ermanno! Thank you for taking the time to share the knowledge! Regards from Romania!

[@methanoid]

Spiral Linux comes with BTRFS snapshot set up by default. Watched LOTs of your videos since I found your channel but now have to wait for your return. I like the sensible choices you make for your installs and guides

[@taidee]

Very nice master Ermanno, thank you. I enjoyed this complex install a lot.

[@nils-yt]

Very useful video! Thanks, Ermanno!

[@pichincho7]

I see this guide is perfectly usable for Debian 12 what comes in a few days. Thank you very much!!

[@philevans7238]

Hello, thank you for creating this brilliant video. It helped me a lot to get debian 11 installed with btrfs and timeshift autosnaps working perfectly. I added the plasma desktop on my install and also added the grub package to show the snapshots on the grub menu. Everything is running perfectly many thanks. Phil

[@aliwaleed2463]

You are amazing you helped me a lot thanks man, keep going !

[@justjoshing75]

Hello Ermano good to see you again.

[@yiannism01]

Thank you! I needed this!

[@andersonls1701]

Muito obrigado por mais esse vídeo Ermano.

[@Chris.Wiley.]

Thanks Ermanno for the expert overview. Seems WAY more complicated that doing it in Arch :-)

[@MichaelJHathaway]

It is more complicated than Arch, Debian can be really hard. But the plus side is server stability matched only by RHEL.

[@AndersJackson]

It is way more complicated, because he uses non standard options in the installation. Which is fine, and you can do that in Debian. The standard installation can almost be done by a chicken, if you put some seed on the enter key. 😉

[@exosfear512]

Can't wait for the day, you do one with wayland. Thank you for this.

[@MichaelJHathaway]

Thanks for the great video. For those who find this too complicated and wish to try Debian 11, the community makes several different types of Live installs, both with free software and non-free.

[@eflinux]

Not with this specific setup and i3, but it’s true that one could use a live iso with the calanares installer and a DE, with manual partitioning, eventually remove the DE if wished and then install i3.

[@romano5222]

🤩😅 Thank you , I finally managed to install my first debian tiling window manager, I surely missed a few steps and have a bit of cleaning to do but it works ! Thanks again !!!!!!😃

[@romano5222]

I had to adapt my way because I use a bios machine and a hdd raid 0 , i'm not sure what are the best mounting options for that. It seems I can't achieve running ssds on this machine since the days of ubuntu studio bionic beaver Anyway it was interesting trying to configure my first raid

[@jairunet]

Excellent! and looking forward to an installation using ZFS, I wonder if you already have a video explaining the reasoning for using BTRFS vs EXT4 or ZFS? I look forward to your response, Thank you for the great tutorial!

[@gastonlagaffe9156]

Great video!!! I already sub. Thank you

[@7505kpersson]

Great video!

[@rickgatewood6442]

I am an Arch user, but I still have a fondness for Debian as well. I recommend Sparky Linux as a Debian based distro that deserves attention , too.

[@Appalling68]

Just wow. Information overload (but that’s a good thing!). 😀

[@romano5222]

Thank you !!!!!!! 🤩

[@jongeduard]

Ah, I still have to watch the rest of this video, this is the second one that I see (suggestion by YT, probably because I looked for it earlier), but I actually did it using a Graphical expert install and that DOES work as well. But as you know you need to use Ctrl+Alt+F* instead of Alt+F* to switch out of the GUI, for which I needed to use "sendkey" in the QEMU that I was doing it on. Not the most practical, but it worked as well. Note that there exists another way of installing debian as well: debootstrap This is a script just like pacstrap for Arch, but then to do a bootstrap install for Debian, which is available on Arch as well, so you can install Debian from a runningg Arch system that way. There exists a manual the internet how to finish a debootstrap install. Seems less up to date than the Arch wiki for comparison, but it's well possible to do things this way. From a running Arch system it's even easier, as you can also use the help of arch-chroot here, so that you don't need to bind mount all the required things yourself.

[@eflinux]

Interesting, I tried that but didn’t work here. I couldn’t jump back to graphical installer.

[@AndersJackson]

A suggestion. If you don't give root a password in the installer, then it will configure sudo so that the user you make will be automatically added to the sudo group, and install sudo. So then you have the added case where the root user are locked from logging in, so it is a bit more secure. So you don't need to add sudo to the user, as the installer does that for you and install sudo, if the root user are given a blank password. Yes, many people misses that. Except for that, the video are very useful for me, as I have not installed this version yet.

[@eflinux]

Just muss habits, thanks for the feedback.

[@kbhasi]

Yep! That was a mistake I made back when I switched from Ubuntu to Debian.

[@jsizemo]

I like this idea. Would you consider doing a similar video for a minimal custom Fedora setup?

[@eflinux]

Definitely:)

[@Kalasklister1337]

​@@eflinux I have just attempted to use the fedora everything installer to do exactly that. For some reason the installer when used in QEMU virtual machine is extremely slow to the point where it takes maybe 5 minutes to move the cursor - making it impossible to install. Even the text based installer is having the same issue so really don't know what is up with that. I tried the new PopOS live cd in the same QEMU setup and it worked flawlessly. Also tried both Virtio and QXL with/without hardware acceleration but to no avail. Doing this on Arch having followed an arch specific QEMU/virt-manager guide to set up. Either help on this or a general install instruction video would be very much appreciated!

[@voiceofthetrue1849]

First of all use space_cache=v2,autodefrag for extra speed ssd not required because it's a default on ssd drive, use apt install arch-install-scripts to have genfs and arch-chroot ;)

[@voiceofthetrue1849]

Don't forget commit=120

[@nevoyu]

Don't use autodefrag on a ssd, it's literally no gain and costs extra wear on the ssd

[@dktol56]

Hi Ermanno. Does the Debian manual installer have an sshd module, so you could ssh to the installer and complete the btrfs setup remotely? That should make things a little less kludgy, since you'd have access to notes and the internet.

[@AndersJackson]

I think I have seen that, but never used it myself. Please try in a virtual machine and tell us the result.

[@attaque71]

Creating the VM in QEMU I get to follow all the setup steps successfully but on first boot he filesystem gets mounted read-only so, can login as root, but can't sudo upgrade :(

[@demonicavenger6987]

Heh, ermanno comes to the rescue again

[@kareemhasan2792]

I have a question if I have a separate home partition already here btrfs file system too and hen I try to mount it as @home subvol it says invalid argument to me 🤔

[@gilgarma5678]

thanks a lot, netinstaller is direct to the point, but a lot too much for the first to use a SSD. Do you have a normal installation xfce or kde. I want to do an real machine install. Haben Sie ein Emfelung? oder Rat?

[@tonyadvantaged9353]

The always "problem" of Debian is getting the right image, can you give advice? As I understood, isn't recommended to can boot as root. It's possible to revoke root to boot or set the user and give privileges before reboot?

[@iambasanta]

help(video) needed on installing void linux using two disks ssd and hdd. I want to put my OS and programs on SSD and media on hdd. is it possible ?

[@dktol56]

Seems like you unmounted, then remounted, the efi system partition at /target/boot/efi without actually doing any thing to it. An unnecessary step?

[@YannMetalhead]

Debian: Installer < Expert Mode Arch Linux < A terminal is all you need.

[@EddieTuckerIV]

FYI, if you're following this for Debian 12 Bookworm, you need to use space_cache=v2 or you'll get btrfs errors at boot

[@janulik9535]

Hello, hopefully this will find you as the video is quite old,:). Anyway could you please publish output of lsblk comand, how it should be after install? I followed video with exatly same instructions and my sda2 is not mounted anymore in / only in /home.

[@kareemhasan2792]

Thanks for this amazing video, but i have a question I have efi machine when I try to boot I didn't find the expert mode . Any thing I could do ?

[@eflinux]

Hmmm…. Which iso did you download?

[@esmirol]

Thanks Ermanno, I have a question: Can I change the btrfs mount options in a working system? It works, but I forget two parameters: ssd, discard=async Is it possible to change my options in fstab without losing data? Can I change the compress parameter from lzo to zstd too?

[@eflinux]

I think that should work.

[@sebsefyu]

I can't unmount /target as i think it is used by reFind boot manager. Can you make a video for dual boot guys using reFind?

[@SaadMorchid]

if you can help me i have a issuse when i want to install debian , i can't saw hard disc

[@peterjansen4826]

In my opinion the maintainers of Debian should use a larger font for the installer. There is a lot of space left on the monitor, I doubt that any user would get annoyed by letters being 'too' large if you would double the fontsize but it would be much easier to read for those of us who are nearsighted. I am not talking about being or not being able to read it at all, I am talking about being able to read it while your monitor is at a normal distance and you sit with your back straight. Or maybe start the installer with a much larger font-size and let the user choose what to set it to from there. I suspect that this font is so small because it was made for lower resolution monitors which have a lower pixel density.

[@eflinux]

I could have also zoomed in more on the screen, but the idea came too late. I did so in the next video, though, for the Arch Linux Arm installation.

[@peterjansen4826]

@@eflinux No problem buddy.

[@Angryjenkinsdigital]

You suspect correctly - some of those larger fonts would look awkward on a 1024x768 screen I imagine

[@omargl81]

Awesome!! You deserve some Tacos from Mexico City!!

[@eflinux]

Love those :)

[@GopinathSadasivam]

during editing fstab I have to use space_cache=v2 instead of just space_cache. If I don't do this my btrfs becomes readonly after install. This is on debian testing (bookworm).

[@Macleod1617]

I wish I read the comments first haha. Thanks

[@dktol56]

Perhaps augment this configuration with grub-btrfs. That would give the linux equivalent of bsd boot environments with available snapshots in the grub menu.

[@eflinux]

That was my intention actually, but in the end I thought the video was complex enough.

[@wanfuse]

Can you point me to the location where you donwloaded this debian image, I have tried both testing and stable, but there is no c for command and I am not sure the behavior will be the same ctrl+alt+F1? Can you advise? Great video by the way!

[@eflinux]

That is the net install, the minimal install iso you find in the Debian downloads.

[@diver_ua]

You could just choose "No" for "Permit root login" question. The installer would ask you for user name and password, and it would install the sudo app, and your user would be already in sudo group. If you like to login as root by using root username - after installation just use "sudo passwd" command, to unlock root user and set it's password...

[@eflinux]

Habits…thanks.

[@AndersJackson]

This is far the most common misunderstanding about Debian installation. People think you can't install Debian with root login locked and sudo installed and the first user set to use sido. So they think that using sudo is only Ubuntu way and not Debian way. Which it of course isn't, it is also Debian way, uf you choose to. Debian way is about chouces. Lots of them. It is documented in standard installation, but people doesn't read the instruction. Just don't set a password for root, and Debian will install and set up sudo for you.

[@imrokwasiba9027]

At first debian was perfect for me. Since debian 10 the wireless network shutdown after reboot and sometimes without reboot. I switced to thumbleweed today.

[@anadolijamajh4181]

I tried your installation, but system was totally unusable read only on root partition. What fixed problem was that I put "space_cache=v2" in options and in fstab also. Cheers mate

[@anadolijamajh4181]

is it need to add rw option also??

[@r.razamhd]

please make updated sid installation

[@lilith1504]

Wish next bookworm we can edit btrfs subvolume in install GUI instead of typing all these lines

[@Eyuphuro]

For the upcoming Ubuntu do a debootstrap install pls.

[@marcevans1106]

Hello Ermanno and thank you. Very good video, but ... impossible to access the root account. I tried several times, I changed the root password, still the same problem: My root password is not accepted. So I can't do any update or install other applications. I must have missed something, but this is not my 1st ISO installation, I think I have enough experience: I've carefully followed your tutorial. Any idea how I could solve this problem of access to the root account? Thanks in advance [On the other hand, I wonder if my problem does not come from my HDD, because at startup I have a message that tells me a problem: "Alert ! Hard drive self monitoring system has reported that a parameter exceeded its normal operating range. Dell recommends that you back up your data regularly" Thus I don't see how a hard drive problem could prevent me from accessing the root account but let me access the main user account without problems ] Well i tried with a brand new HDD, & still no way to log into the root. What am i doing wrong ??? Mark

[@piotrtalarczyk8987]

Ciao, potresti farlo in Alma Linux?

[@knowledge_harvester]

My debian and almost 90% of all distro keep freezing the whole system randomly and only way out is rebooting in the power button, any idea on what could the issue could be?

[@eflinux]

What system do you have?

[@knowledge_harvester]

@@eflinux ALL DISTRO, it happened less on older debian version, but yes I've tried all distro debian,ubuntu, pop os, fedora,linux mint. RN I'm on windows cuz it doesn't happen here.

[@alang7273]

Thanks Ermanno. I would like to know how to reduce or incresse zram size.

[@eflinux]

You can change that in the /etc/default/zramswap file.

[@alang7273]

@@eflinux Thanks

[@tiktok.4527]

Yess.... Debian linux!!!!!😍😍😍😍

[@morbias7653]

Great Video....Can't login after i install i3...i suspect it is a wayland issue...looking into how to fix this...

[@morbias7653]

All good...made a mistake in fstab

[@sohrobby]

It's a shame that Debian doesn't include the ability to create subvolumes in the installer. I have to wonder if lots of people are missing out on the key benefits of BTRFS because of the complexity involved.

[@alexstone691]

It so disappointing that btrfs subvolumes are so complicated to do with debian installer

[@andrei-edward-popa]

At 14:10 why you didn't umount /mnt?

[@eflinux]

Because the subvolumes to mount were in there

[@anasouardini]

why??

[@riseabove3082]

I still hate Debian. I mean it's ok but I just HATE the installer, it always, always, gets stuck on Wifi drivers and I have to go back to the website to find and save some obscure named driver onto a USB stick and go back to the PC to install. Debian is like 1990 all over again with floppy disks while everyone else is in the future. Even their website is stuck in 1990. No thanks Debian. I try and try to like you but you give me too many reasons to hate you.

[@eflinux]

Probably it uses a Wi-Fi driver package which does not contain the driver for your adapter. Might come with the next release though.

[@AndersJackson]

@@eflinux it is all about freedom of software. If one chose hardware where the device driver and firmware is open, then you have no problem with installing WIFI, because then Debian can distribut it. And this is why I love Debian. To be consistent and true to its values. There are one installation ISO which contain non free firmware, one could try to use that. And one could also add non-free repository where a lot of software are added, that isn't supported be Debian. Because they are not allowed to do that. As it us non free software and how that work

[@inscritodoyoutube]

Great video, you explain it very well! I'm from Brazil and I found your tutorial to be the most complete on KZbin... If I may ask a question; I already did this format about 9 months ago and installed Debian 12 Cinamom, but as my hardware is 12 years old, I'm going to install a minimal installation with Icewm. (I put everything in one partition like in your example.) The question is, I wanted to do it with a SEPARATE HOME on another partition and I would like to know if the process is the same as "# umount" for both partitions? My BIOS is Legacy and I noticed that there is no EFI option when manually dividing the SSD... is this a problem? Hugs and success!

[@TurntableTV]

Hi Ermanno! Great video as always! I have an error when trying to do apt update or apt install sudo - "unable to mkstemp /tmp/clearsigned.message.3X9yoY - GetTempFile (30: Read-only file system)".

[@jayhughes3843]

I asked about Btrfs in a thread on the official FreeBSD forums and it received heavy criticism. My post is #22 in the thread titled 'OpenBSD / GhostBSD / FreeBSD'