@fredslev

Hello,

I know there are tons and tons of guides and howtos out there, how to do this, but i will anyway show you “my way” of doing to.

I suspect you to know how to work in a console, and now to be afraid of using an editor, such as vi, vim, or nano. Plus common sense :-)

Right, first you go to debian.org and click Getting Debian at the top of the page. I asume you are going to use a usb stick for the installation, so click Here for 32bit or Here for 64 bit. Click the netboot link, and download the “mini.iso” (16mb of size). When its dowloaded, “write” it to your usb stick. I do it like this :

dd if=/path/to/download/mini.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=4M; sync

(where X is fx sdb, sdc etc) and remember you can only use dd as root!

If you are using Windows, get the win32imager (which is dd for Windows) Here.

Reboot your PC, hit F-”whatever” for bootscreen so you can pick the usb key (its F11 on my PC)

I strongly assume you have installed Debian before, because if not… This guide is not ment for you. I suggest you head over to debian.org and read the Installation guide first, and come back here when you have done so :)

Follow the Installer and do the harddisk partitioning (keep a note on what harddisk you chose, some systems like my own, have the usb key as /dev/sda), set the root password, create a user, and so on, and when it comes to what to install, don’t and i repeat DO NOT install any graphical enviroment, we’ll take care of that later :)

When it comes to “install bootloader” Say no, and type in /dev/sdb or what the name of the harddisk was when you did the partitioning, the usb key on my system is ALWAYS /dev/sda. When the bootloader is installed, hit continue and the system will reboot.

Login as root. The first thing we’ll do is to upgrade your Debian from Squeeze(stable) to Wheezy(testing). To do so, enter this:

nano -w /etc/apt/sources.list

Then you need your sources.list to look like this :

###### Debian Main Repos
deb http://ftp.dk.debian.org/debian/ wheezy main contrib non-free

###### Debian Update Repos
deb http://security.debian.org/ wheezy/updates main contrib non-free
deb http://ftp.dk.debian.org/debian/ wheezy-proposed-updates main contrib non-free

#### Debian Multimedia – http://www.debianmultimedia.org/
deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org testing main non-free

Save and exit (Control + X if using nao) and type :

apt-get update

Notice the error

Then do :

apt-get install debian-multimedia-keyring

Then again do :

apt-get update

And then

apt-get dist-upgrade

After about 10-15 min depending on your netspeed, and how fast the upgrade is going (CPU and RAM is a factor here) you will reboot into the new kernel, and we will continue.

Login as root.

And do this :

apt-get install xfce4 xfce4-goodies

(yes i know i said awesom wm, but i use xfce as a backend for mixers, icons and so on)

After xfce is installed, we install awesome and a login manager (i chose slim in this case)

Do this :

apt-get install awesome slim

If you dont care or dont use other keymap than us, you are done here, and can reboot, and when slim pops up, hit F1 a few times, till you see “awesome”, enter username and password for your own user, not the root password.

If you dont use us keymap, do as i (i’m from denmark and i need my funky letters æ ø å)

nano -w ~/.xinitrc

and i have this in my .xinitrc

xset s off
xset -dpms
setxkbmap dk
exec awesome

The xset stuff turns off screenblanking and powersaving, if you want the screen to go black every 5 or 10 min, remove it from the file :)

I know this guide isnt a “complete” guide, but this is how i do it after a reinstall, and it has worked well so far. I didnt suggest what icontheme you can use, nor did i suggest any awesome theme, i leave that to you, and as for how to use awesome, as you pretty much has no icons nor a menu, i leave that to you too. If i feel the need for this, and i get asked too much, i WILL add it to this guide.

Until then, take care out there, and be nice to each other :)