Installing Debian Testing from USB Key

I’ve been on the hunt for a new Linux Distribution for a while – Ubuntu 11.10 – while impressive – is too much for my seven year old laptop. I’m a bit disgusted really that with 704MB of available RAM that it doesn’t really work as snappily as a plain TTY But, to be fair to Ubuntu I am running it on my work PC now as of yesterday and while there are some obvious annoyances (e.g. no panels in Unity, sometimes losing applications from the task switcher) it’s certainly a promising start. They tell me 12.04 is going to be well polished – ps. Good luck Thomi with the new job!

I’ve tried Linux Mint and again, the standard of this distribution is exceptional, but again the seven-year-old super-laptop grimaces a little too much under the weight.

This blog post is about installing Debian Testing from a USB key. I hunted around for how to do it and the answer wasn’t immediately apparent. There are tutorials that help you out by getting you to zcat a boot.img.gz onto your USB key, then copy the Debian ISO etc but this didn’t work for me. I think this was because the method was outdated and not compatible with the latest ISO.

By the way – don’t be put off by the term “testing” when it comes to Debian. The stable release may seem to be the likely choice and it is very stable – it hardly changes and is deliberately out of date. Only security updates are applied to it. This is suitable for a server environment, or for your mum if having slightly out of date applications isn’t an issue and you don’t want things changing on her. If you want a more up to date distribution that keeps pace with the latest applications, go for Debian Testing. If you want the bleeding edge latest developer release, go for Debian Unstable. You probably don’t want this though.

Anyway, back to the installation – fortunately the solution is very simple. Over here they say that the latest Debian ISO’s can be directly dd’d to a USB drive. This means that you can simply:

1. Download the Debian Testing ISO (I chose the netinst ISO which will bootstrap me onto the network during the install process and then drag the rest off the internet as required)
2. Plug in your USB key to your linux box
3. Unmount it if it got automatically mounted (e.g. right click it on the desktop and choose unmount)
4. Install it onto your USB key with the following command: dd if=/path/to/debian-testing-i386-netinst.iso of=/dev/sdd bs=1M
5. When that has finished, boot your computer from your USB key and the Debian installer will lead you through the installation process (I’m at 87% currently)