Debian 13

Debian 13 (Sid) is the Unstable as they call it but if you have really new hardware nothing else might work. If your monitor is stuck at 800 x 600 or less that it can do you might need Debian 12 or 13.

Download Debian 11.4 unofficial non-free from here

I prefer the Mate Desktop Environment

Burning ISO to a SD card or USB Stick

Open a terminal (Ctrl Alt t) and check what devices are installed before plugging in the SD card or USB stick.

sudo fdisk -l

Plug in the SD card or USB stick and run fdisk again to find out the device name of the SD card or USB stick.

sudo fdisk -l

In my case you can see the Micro SD card is /dev/sda

Open a terminal in the directory where the ISO file is and list the files and get the path using the following

cd Downloads
pwd
ls -1

Now burn the ISO to the SD card or USB stick using dd.

sudo dd if=full/path/to/iso/file of=/dev/sd? bs=8192 status=progress
sudo dd if=/home/john/Downloads/debian-live-11.4.0-amd64-mate+nonfree.iso of=/dev/sda bs=8192 status=progress

When dd is done you get this

Boot up to the SD card or USB stick and select Graphical Install.

DO NOT enter a root password, just pass it by. If you do you can’t use the sudo command to do root things.

Fix all the annoying things Debian programmers have given us before upgrading to Debian 13 Debian 11 Fixes.

After the install is complete you need to edit the sources.list file. Press Ctrl Alt t to open a terminal

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

Change the deb and deb-src lines to match the following and delete the rest.

deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ sid main non-free contrib
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian/ sid main non-free contrib

Press Ctrl x then y then Enter to save and exit.

Open a terminal (Ctrl Alt t) and update the repository

sudo apt update

Install Debian 13

sudo apt full-upgrade

A couple of blue screens will popup just accept the default by pressing Enter.

Clean up

sudo apt autoremove
sudo apt clean

Reboot the PC