Debian Installation Checklist

After Googling and ogling a lot of documentation about installing Debian in a chroot environment, I decided to put together this quick checklist, mostly for my own purposes, so that I wouldn't have to search around so much the next time I install Debian. Feel free to use it if you wish.

Pre-installation steps

1. Partition the hard drive as you wish and create filesystems of your choice on the partitions to use. Make sure to have at least a root directory and a swap partition.
2. Set the system time and date, if necessary.

Main procedure

1. Get and install debootstrap. The Debian package can be fetched from /debian/pool/main/d/debootstrap on your preferred Debian mirror, such as ftp://ftp.se.debian.org/.
2. Run debootstrap to bootstrap the base system. Quick command:

   debootstrap --arch amd64 buster /mnt/debian ftp://ftp.se.debian.org/debian

3. Mount /proc and /sys in Debian's prefix.
4. Chroot into the bootstrapped system.
5. Set the timezone by running dpkg-reconfigure tzdata.
6. Set up /etc/fstab.
7. Add LANG="en_US.UTF-8" or similar to /etc/default/locale.
8. Set up network information in /etc/hostname, /etc/hosts and /etc/network/interfaces. A rather standard configuration for the last would be as follows:

   auto lo eth0
   
   iface lo inet loopback
   iface eth0 inet dhcp

   debootstrap should have gotten /etc/resolv.conf right, but it is wise to check to be sure.
9. Set up /etc/apt/sources.list. The following is a rather sane default configuration for a stable system:

   deb http://ftp.se.debian.org/debian buster main contrib
   deb-src http://ftp.se.debian.org/debian buster main contrib
   deb http://security.debian.org/ buster/updates main contrib
   deb-src http://security.debian.org/ buster/updates main contrib

   Remember to run apt-get update afterwards.
10. Set the root password.
11. Set APT::Install-Recommends "0"; in /etc/apt/apt.conf.
12. Install the locales-all package.
13. Install the console-data, unicode-data and kbd packages.
14. Install a kernel, such as linux-image-amd64. It is probably a good idea to set up a /etc/kernel-img.conf first, as well. Sample contents:

    do_symlinks = Yes
    do_initrd = Yes
    link_in_boot = Yes
    

15. Install sysvinit-core and remove systemd.
16. Install and set up GRUB. Note that the package from GRUB 2 is grub-pc, not grub. Sample config:

    set timeout=10
    set default=0
    
    menuentry "Debian Buster" {
    	insmod gzio
    	set root=(hd0,msdos1)
    	linux /boot/vmlinuz ro root=/dev/sda1
    	initrd /boot/initrd.img
    }

    Note, in particular, that the initrd requires a root filesystem on LVM to be specified as /dev/mapper/$VG-$LV, not as /dev/$VG/$LV.
17. You can now boot into your Debian system, if you wish.

Post-installation goodies

You may want to run tasksel to get some common packages (for example, the standard set).

Useful extra packages

• nfs-common
• less
• nis
• krb5-user
• libpam-krb5
• openssh-server

This site attempts not to be broken.