 One of my favorite Linux distributions is Debian. It is a fantastic Gnu slash Linux distribution It's been around forever. It's one of the oldest actively maintained Linux distributions. It got its start in late 1993 so it's been around for a long time and Debian is also kind of like the grandfather Distribution because so many other distributions base off of Debian because it has a fantastic repository of software a huge repository of software where It's hard to to find a piece of software that's not in the Debian repos And that's one of the reasons people run Debian the other reason people typically run Debian is because of how rock solid stable The main Debian edition is matter of fact the the real product that they push is actually Debian stable Even though they have three different branches. They have stable testing and unstable You're gonna have a hard time going to the Debian website and finding an ISO for Debian testing or Debian unstable The reason you're gonna have a hard time finding those isos those isos don't exist Debian actually doesn't want people running the testing and unstable branches because those are rolling release branches And obviously things can break when you run a rolling release distribution, but I like living on the edge, right? I like running rolling release distributions like arch Linux and arch based Distributions that's kind of what I've lived on here in the last couple of years So if I was gonna install Debian on any of my personal machines I probably would use the unstable branch and today I'm gonna show you guys how to get Debian unstable installed So let me switch over to my desktop and let me get to my web browser Now the Debian website is very confusing They have a lot of different isos on their website But it's really weird how you have to navigate through a ton of different pages to grab an ISO But what you guys want to do if you want to install Debian unstable go to the Debian unstable page in the Debian wiki I will link to this in the show description And if you scroll down you have installation and they tell you three different ways you can install Debian The recommended way is to install Debian stable and then change the app sources So they're pointing to the unstable repositories and then do a full system upgrade So you update all the stable packages to the unstable packages. That's the recommended way I don't like doing it that way because Why install Debian stable and then do a massive update to install all the unstable packages Why not just install the unstable packages directly? And that's what I'm gonna do and it's the section here use the unstable mini ISO image so what you want to do is you want to grab the mini ISO from the Debian mirrors and It's listed under Debian slash dist slash unstable slash main slash installer slash current slash images slash netboot That is a very very long path. I would have to navigate here Through this first. I would choose a country. I am in the US. So I'd go to the US mirrors here And then I'm gonna go through dist. I forget the full path and just unstable okay, we keep going down to unstable and Then main looks like I've been there before Installer dash amd 64 because I'm on a 64 bit system and then current and then images And then netboot And then mini.iso that is the image that you want to download now My problem with this mini.iso is I'm looking at the date and the last time that this was released was the 6th of june And right now it is july 30th. That's two months old that mini.iso and because we're installing a rolling release I don't like doing a two month old ISO. So what i'm going to do is i'm actually going to go to their daily images So if you go to d-i dot debian dot org for daily images go to daily images and follow the same kind of path I'm going to do amd 64 daily Netboot and here is mini.iso and that's the one i'm going to grab And i'm going to go ahead and install debian inside of virtual machines So what you want to do when you first boot into the mini.iso instead of choosing install Don't choose install because if you just choose install you're going to get the standard debian installer that installs debian stable because that's what they expect Most people to actually want but you want to go to advanced options and go to expert install and this is going to launch a in-curses installer But don't worry that it's an in-curses installer. It's very very easy to navigate this installer So the very first thing choose language just hit enter and by default it selects english That's correct for me if you needed to change the language of course you would navigate through the list and then hit enter on your language, but i'm just going to hit enter And choose country or territory. United states is already selected. So i'm going to hit enter Country to base default locale settings my locale should be united states as well And do we want to add any additional locales? I'm okay with just the one locale So i'm going to tab to get to the continue box over here Let me move my head out of the way so you have continue here And then we just go to the next part of the installation So the next step access software for a blind person using a braille display. I won't have any Visually impaired people using this virtual machine. So i'm actually going to skip that step I'm just going to arrow down to the next thing here, which is configure the keyboard. I'm just going to hit enter Keymaps american english is the default. That's correct for me. So i'm just going to hit enter Detect network hardware. I'm going to hit enter and do we want to install a usb storage module? That's ticked on by default I would just leave that ticked on then I would hit tab to get to continue and hit enter The next step is configure the network just hit enter and it asks you do you want to have debian auto configure networking? Absolutely. So just hit enter and then it's going to say waiting time for link detection The default is three just leave it as three tab to get to the continue button and hit enter This will take just a few seconds to configure the networking Next it asks you to enter a hostname. So this is the hostname of the computer by default is chosen debian I'm just going to leave it as debian and then we need to enter a domain name Now obviously we only need really a domain name if this is going to be like a web server I'm just going to hit tab to get to continue and I'll just leave the domain name blank Now choose a mirror of the debian archive. So let me hit enter This is of course syncing some some mirrors so we can actually download software. How do we want to get this? Do we want to do it over http https or ftp? The default is http and they say it's less prone to problems such as If you had a firewall installed or something. So i'm just going to leave it as http So i'm going to hit enter and then it asks what country we're in. I'm in the united states So it'll show us mirrors inside the united states by default deb dot debian dot org is selected for us I'm okay with that. I'm just going to hit enter http proxies i'm not using a proxy So i'm just going to tab to get to continue and hit enter Then it says debian comes in several flavors. So we have stable testing and unstable I'm going to arrow down to the SID branch, which is the unstable branch and hit enter Then download installer components. I'm just going to hit enter on this and then it gives us a bunch of extra Installer related stuff that we could add if we needed it But honestly most people are never going to need any of this stuff This is just extra Installer components to use during the installation process if you needed to for example, there's modules for SSH I guess if you were installing debian over SSH and things like that I'm just going to hit tab to get to the continue button to move forward here And now we get back to the menu and this time the menu Has more things in it because now we have the option of setting up users and passwords and things like this So let's go ahead and set up the user and password it asks us do we want to enable shadow passwords? Yes is recommended. So I will choose yes Do we want a root user and do we want to allow the root user to actually be able to log in? That's okay for me So i'm just going to hit yes And now we need to create a root password for the root user So let's create a strong and complicated password for the root user and then tab over to continue Then re-enter that strong and complicated root password and hit continue Now it asks us do you want to create a normal user because you don't want just the root user because It's dangerous to do everything as root. You need a normal user. So definitely create one. So i'm going to hit enter I'm going to call my New user my normal user dt and then i'll Tab over to continue the user name for the account is dt And then we need to create a strong and complicated password for the dt user and then tab over and then Re-enter the password and tab over and then configure the clock just hit enter set the clock using ntp. That is okay And it's asking about the ntp server just use the default and then select the time zone I'm in the central time zone in the us. So I will hit enter on central Detect disc just hit enter and it should detect your physical disc in your machine for me I'm using a virtual machine and there is one virtual disc in this virtual machine Then it asked about partitioning the disc so hit enter on that And now we get the standard partitioning screen that you guys have probably seen and things like the ubiquity installer the calamari's installer What do you want to do with your partitions? Do you want the automatic partitioning? Which is the first option use the entire disc? That's what i'm going to go with but if you wanted to you could go down here to manual partitioning and do it manually yourself I'm just going to let dibby and do its thing. So we're going to do The entire disc and it's going to take up the entire 20 gig hard drive virtual hard drive in this virtual machine I'm going to hit enter on that then it asks us Do we want to create a separate home partition in this virtual machine? That would be unused space that would cause me some problems. So I'm actually not going to separate my home partition I'm just going to do all falls in one partition And then we get an overview of the partition scheme and finally just hit enter on finish partitioning and write changes to disc And then it asks for confirmation one more time tab over to yes and hit enter And then install the base system hit enter This may take a few minutes and then we get to the next screen which asks about the kernel What kernel do you want to install by default? It's chosen the standard generic kernel here There is also the rt kernel. That's the real-time kernel. There's some other stuff here But i'm just going to go with the standard generic kernel. So i'm just going to hit enter Now it's asking about drivers to include in the init rd It's selected generic which includes all available drivers And of course that's for safety purposes right that covers everybody just give all the drivers, right? So that's the one I would go with you could also do targeted where it kind of surges your machine and figures out the Exact drivers you need i'm just going to do generic here And the base system finished installing now the next thing is to configure the package manager And then it asks us do we want to use non-free software? So this will enable the non-free repositories inside debian because by default debian is strictly free software Now you want to enable the non-free software So that way you can get your proprietary drivers if you need them and most hardware is going to need some proprietary drivers Your laptops many of them have wi-fi chips that must have a proprietary wi-fi driver for them to work And then of course nvidia users typically are going to want to use the proprietary nvidia drivers for their graphics cards So I strongly advise you to turn on non-free software unless for you know for sure that your hardware works with strictly free software Then it's asking about the default source repositories And this allows you to be able to run the command app dash get source Make sure that command works do you want to enable the source repositories in apt by default? Yes, I selected i'm just going to go with that Now it's configuring the apt package manager the standard package manager in debian Now it's asking about select and install software. So let's hit enter on that First it's asking us do we want to set up automatic updates that way we never have to worry about updating the machine It'll do it automatically. I don't like doing automatic updates. I would rather do it myself So i'm going to do no automatic updates if you want automatic updates, obviously you would choose the other option Then it's asking about pop con pop con is the popularity contest program that's built into debian It sends information back to debian So if you choose to participate in this what it does it's going to send information about your machine back to debian So they can make a better distribution typically on real machines. I would choose yes for this I don't mind giving them a little information in this vm though. I'm just going to choose no And now we get to the screen where we can choose our desktop environment by default is chosen the standard debian desktop environment, which is typically gnom. I'm going to tick these off though because I'm going to install a different one I'm going to install kde plasma Then I'm going to tab down to continue and hit enter And kde plasma has a lot of packages that have to install Thankfully debian is a binary distribution rather than a source based distribution So this should only take just a few minutes And it's finished installing plasma. The next thing is to install the grub bootloader So i'm just going to hit enter on that and it should do this automatically There's nothing for us to do We don't have to edit any kind of config files or anything that the debian incurses installer is actually very very easy Now it's asking us where should we install the grub bootloader which device And it's asking do you want to install it to the primary drive? That's okay. If this is a single operating system computer, so i'm just going to hit yes Now it's asking for the device. It's slash dev slash vda in my case Now it's asking do we want to force the grub installation to the efi removable media path? So i'm actually going to decline that Now it's asking do we want to finish the installation and absolutely so They should do some last-minute things such as setting the clock and then Hopefully we're getting close to the reboot. Yes, and now it's saying finish the installation hit continue And it should reboot the machine for us And it reboots just fine. We get a grub menu. So let's go ahead and boot in to our freshly installed debian unstable All right, and we get the login manager So let's go ahead and i'm going to click the screen here the drop down just to make sure plasma is the only Desktop environment installed and it is that's the only one I selected during the installation. Let's go ahead and log in All right, and we log in to a very plain vanilla Looking of plasma desktop environment although plasma is very very attractive out of the box I am going to go ahead and change the screen resolution to 1920 by 1080 that way That is set every time I open this vm from here on out because I may keep this vm around for a little bit And that is really all there is to getting up and running with debian unstable I'm just going to go to the applications menu just very briefly to see what is installed by default here in the plasma edition Looks like it did install a pretty good suite of software including gimp So it's not all just the kde applications because gimp, of course is a gtk application So there is actually a little bit of stuff installed here if I go back to internet Let's see. Does it install a browser for us? Yes, it installed firefox for us and under multimedia We have dragon player and k3b the disk burner. Do we have an office suite? Libre office was also installed by default for us. So the debian kde Desktop actually does include a pretty good bit of software. So that's nice So one thing I do want to show you guys is let me go ahead and open up a terminal So in kde the terminal is called console with a k So i'm going to open up console and i'm going to zoom way in so you guys can see this and i'm going to run this command sudo apt update And and sudo apt upgrade This command is the standard command you run in debian and all debian based distributions to update all your software So this works in ubuntu linux mint mx all debian based distributions It asks for the sudo password. So let me type dt's password And dt is not in the sudoers file meaning he does not have sudo privileges So this is how debian differs from ubuntu and mint and a lot of the other debian based distributions You've probably used is your normal user can't do anything with sudo until you add him to the sudoers file So let's do this So let's su over to the root user because we need root privileges here And then as root open in your favorite text editor. It can be nano. It can be vim Um, but whatever text editor you want to use open slash ipsy slash sudoers And then you have this file here and i'm going to go down to this line here root And then all equals all colon all all What i'm going to do here in vm as i'm just going to copy that line I'm going to do yy to copy and then p to paste And it's going to complain i'm changing a read only file. That's fine Then i'm going to do cw for change word and i'm going to do dt and then i also need to change some of this Because i don't need the colon all so i'm going to delete that and hit escape And now if i do a colon wq to write and quit out of vm It's going to complain that it is a read only file So i need to do colon wq exclamation point to override that and now let me su to the dt user And now my up arrow back to sudo apt update and then sudo apt upgrade It's going to ask for a sudo password. Let me hit enter And there you go It's updating the system There shouldn't be anything to update because we just did a fresh internet install So all the packages should be absolutely up to date But now we know that dt has sudo privileges and close out that So that was a very quick installation process, right? It's very easy to install debian and if you want to move to debian testing or in my case debian unstable Just grab that mini iso I'm going to give you a link in the show description because it is very confusing how to find that mini iso from debian's website Because it's like a labyrinth Of isos that you've got to navigate from their site now Should you be running debian unstable because obviously the debian guys would say you probably need to run the stable version of Debian well, it depends on use case if you're if you need the Bleeding edge software you need the latest and greatest especially if you maybe you're a developer and you need the latest and greatest Libraries for whatever programming languages you work in and things like that then being on a rolling release distribution Makes a lot more sense than being on a stable distribution for what I do because I play with so much Software I'm always trying out new software You know I hear about this new piece of software and I want to try it out It's not going to be available in debian stable Right, it's that piece of software this brand new hasn't made it into debian stable yet But it will be in debian unstable and that's why I run rolling release distributions Now before I go I want to thank a few special people I want to thank the producers of this episode Epsy Gabe james michael paul west a commie allen chuck curt david dylan gregory hyco erion alexander peace arch infador Polytech raver scott steven and willy these guys They're my highest tiered patrons over on patreon without these guys This episode about how to install debian unstable would not have been possible The show is brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well These names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on patreon Because i'm sponsored by you guys the community if you like my work and want to support me Please consider subscribing to distro tube over on patreon. All right guys peace I love unstable distributions. Keep you on your toes