01/08/25 Yet Another Debian Installation Story Only Doing: The Subtle Hazard of Instruction Communication #001 --- I have been experiencing a bout of bad luck as of late, specifically relating to computer hardware. For one reason or another I've had no less than three laptops die on me in the last month! When the first went I was annoyed and inconvenienced. With the second came frustration and anger. And by the last I was practially expecting anything silicon to sponteneously compust if I so much as sneezed. All in all, it was a rather trying experience. (Really it was just three computers and in hindsight not worth getting so flustered about but do not judge me, Gentle Reader, for emotions are a very powerful thing - both good and bad. And when you are in the moment it is hard to lift your head up and see the bigger picture.) However, in an effort to keep myself from sinking into a depression I tried to find the positives of the situation. For many years, I have considered myself a 'Linux User' and yet I have never used Linux as my primary OS. It was always in a VM, or WSL, or a second laptop. But given the sudden and pressing need for new hardware, I saw this was a prime opportunity to finally make the switch in earnest. I decided on Debian as, in my opinion, it is a nice middle-of-the-road distriubtion - not too handholdy (as Ubuntu can sometimes be) and not too DIY like Arch and Gentoo. So I downloaded a net installer, burnt it to a USB stick and set off on my Debian installation journey. # First Steps It wasn't long before I hit my first snag - the BIOS did not seem to recognise that I had a USB stick plugged in. I had plugged it into the front panel of my (brand new and as of yet not dead) PC as it was the most easily accessible. Switching to one of the rear ports on the motherboard's IO panel seemed to do the trick and I moved swiftly on. The first thing I was presented with was a GRUB menu and while having a little explore I found an 'Expert Graphical Install' option under the 'Advanced Setting'. Before you jump to conclusions, Gentle Reader, I do not consider myself and expert and honestly have no right using such a menu. But is it a fault to try? And besides, the expert menu will reveal to us some more nuts and bolts that would otherwise go unnoticed if we went with the regular 'Graphical Install'. We may not understand them, true, but we will at least be aware of their existence and that is the first step in any good learning - discovering what you _don't_ know. The expert menu consists of a dozen or so sections, the first of which is language - an important one. After that I skipped the accessibility setups and moved onto keyboard layout. It is here, Gentle Reader, that we find our first nut and/or bolt - locales. I have come across locales before, but I must profess I'm not sure what they are, what they do or how they do it. I believe it defines some particulars beyond just language, such as whether one million should be displayed as 1,000,000 or 1.000.000 and do forth. I never was very good at leaving the unknown be, so come with me on this little detour into locales, will you? # The Locales Detour # Back to it With the appropriate locales selected, we can continue on our installation journey! The next step to take is to detect the installation media and load the installer components. The barebones Linux environment that the installer boots into does not contain all the bits and pieces required for the install as a lot of it is setup specific. What hardware you have, what drivers you need. That sort of thing. By loading only the components we need for our specific install, we can save a little time. At least, that's what I think is going on here. Anyway, I digress. Once we've detected the installation media we can select the components that we wish to install. Most of these are not necessary for this install but one thing that caught my eye was 'Detect OEM Driver Injection Disk'. Now I had received a USB drive along with the motherboard that I had purchased and I thought to myself 'Ah ha, drivers for the on board hardware!'. I know getting the right drivers and debugging driver related issues can often be a pain, so I hoped this magic 'get all the drivers you need' button would save me much hassle down the line. With much excitement I ticked the box, inserted said USB drive and ran the freshly added 'Detect virtual driver disks from harware manufacturer' option. Alas my excitement did not last long, for the screen froze, blank as a fresh canvas and no amount of thorough mouse-wigglage would bring it back to life. One restart and a handful of button clicks later, I was back again.