Installing Linux The "Right" Way

so first off before we get into this i have to say installing linux the right way is not for everybody if you've never touched linux let's say you're not computer savvy this is probably going to be a bit much for you so for you users out there i would recommend linux mint just go to linuxmint.com and click download and go through their install instructions for those that have never seen or touched linux this is one way i'd i'd probably recommend people get acquainted with it because it comes with all these tools and all this stuff but as someone that's used linux professionally before even doing anything with the desktop i gotta say i don't like a lot of the stuff many distributions do so for me this is the wrong way and when i have quotes when i say the right way this is the way i considered where i started to really fall in love with linux is being able to choose all this stuff now it doesn't necessarily have to be debian in my prior video i talked about debian arch and fedora these are base distributions that so many distributions are based off of that these are the perfect building blocks for the perfect distribution for you because every distribution uh the perfect one is really the one you make and that's what i want to get into today is building that right distribution so let's get into installing first order business debian.org this is going to be probably the best one to start with just because it's so wildly widely used it's by far you know ubuntu is based on it popos linux mint you name it there's there's literally hundreds of distributions based on debian and debian is the building blocks for most modern day linux desktops the first hurdle we have to touch with debian is uh this is where it gets a little weird the download downloading the operating system is probably the hardest part of this entire process i kid you not so here's how you download debian you're gonna laugh you click download you don't want to download this one and you don't want to download anything that they recommend because it's run by neck beards that don't really understand and really i don't think they actually want users to use vanilla debian so they don't include unofficial non-free stuff so if like you want to install a nvidia driver for instance that's just not going to work out of the box using their one so we have to find these non-free firmware packages and they barrier them so if you click on this link this takes you to a whole long explanation it's it's the wrong link so come back here so we're still on the just the forward slash download click unofficial non-free you get this file system one and what i want to do is get you more on the bleeding edge so you get a little bit newer packages a better experience in my opinion uh so we want to come to weekly builds not daily builds but weekly builds click on that click on 64-bit because you're probably on a 64-bit system and then come into iso cd not any of these other ones this is i think blu-ray disc this is dvd just the base cd will do it because we're going to download as we install the latest and greatest and then we're just going to grab firmwaretesting.edu educational is not what you want you just want firmware testing click this it's about 600 megs and this is how you download debian uh silly it's completely stupid if someone from debian.org um watches this put it in a spot that where people could actually download the thing you shouldn't need to do all this but again debian people don't want you to use debian so after you download that iso i'd probably get on etcher.io or balina.io and just download this it has a mac client it has a windows client usually installs just fine if you're on windows you could also use rufus but basically just create it plug it i've done a lot of videos explaining that whole process of creating the usb drive but for this one let's just pretend like i made the usb drive with that iso using etcher and then let's get to the boot process all right and then we get to our loaded screen here on our computer so you could do graphical install but if you're using like nvidia card or something in your system a lot of times this won't work so i really recommend just doing the base install without graphics i know that sounds a little scary but you'll get to that logic it basically takes out a lot of variables that can kind of trip you up so we're going to click install and then we just select our language which is english united states and we'll just select american english at the top it loads the basic components here automatically configures our networking and then we just simply name the system and i'm just going to call this debian dash testing domain name leave that blank root password don't put anything here just hit enter enter this disables the root account which is recommended for security purposes and then we type in our name which will be titus titus for the username and then i'm just going to create a very simple password and i'm central time and now it says okay what do you want to do now this is where you will wipe out your disk right here it's formatting the disks i'm just going to use the entire disk which is just a simple virtual machine but if you have any other partitioning you do it manually here as well so let's finish and write our changes so now it's basically installing the base system this will take some time uh it will download all the latest uh packages as we do this so the whole point of us doing it this way is we're not going to have these large downloads after we finish installing the system because this was created literally yesterday from the debian organization which is great so a lot of times when you're distro hopping they make that distro iso like six months or a year ago and then you go to update it after install and you're like oh i guess i gotta wait another hour while it downloads you know you know like 20 gigs of data from uh all the packages that were just installed now to vita updated so that's why we do it this way and you can see right here as it's finishing up the base system it's installing uh linux image 5.18 which is one of the latest so that's why this is a very different install than many distributions i think ubuntu is on like 5.14 same with like linux mint which is based on ubuntu and a lot of their base stable packages are a little bit different in this one where you're going to get more you get a little closer to arch i should say than your traditional install which basically just means we're going to have a lot more up-to-date stuff i can't emphasize that enough now we can configure the package manager we're going to do scan for extra media we're just going to say no no extra media i'm in the states you choose whatever archive mirror if you're unsure just choose the top one debian.org i do know lease web has a dallas fort worth mirror so since i'm in dallas i'm going to select this one but for most people you'd select the top one we're about 5 minutes or so into this installation now i want to run through and give you some visual cues of what you're selecting here typically you always have this top one selected this is just your desktop one and the bottom one standard system utilities you also will have that selected so now you have these things in between this is the desktop environment if you don't know what that is check out my last video but i'm going to just show the desktop kind of what you'd see it's obviously going to differ from what i'm about to show you but i just want to prepare you first off is gnome looks like this xfce will probably look something like this kde looks like this absolutely love it it's my personal favorite kde cinnamon is not going to look like this is actually we're going to install today we're going to mimic what linux mint kind of would look like his cinnamon's designed by the linux mint team so we're going to install that today mate which will look like this lxde don't use that one lxd is like a depreciated desktop environment and lxqt is its successor so you would want lxqt it's it's an active development and it's still a very lightweight one out of everything you see here lxqt will be the lightest weight so if you're installing this on a potato install lxqt it's very reminiscent of what you see in like ubuntu and then those bottom two options are like web server and ssh that's if you're doing like a web server or remoting into the system so for this one we're gonna uncheck gnome and select cinnamon emulating a linux mint install now this is going to take a while as it is downloading the most up-to-date version of that which is you know 600 packages so i do anticipate this taking close to 10 to 15 minutes even though it's saying oh yeah there you go it was saying one minute but yeah now an update i was like nah that's not right so yeah give this a minute walk away grab a cup of coffee and i'll see you here shortly all right so all the base packages were installed and now we have our desktop environment and you're presented grub boot loader this is just basically giving us a boot menu we'll hit yes to this and then usually you just select the drive that you're installing it to in this instance there's only one drive so we're just selecting that once that's finished you'll see a couple progress bars and then we have finished the install so we'll hit continue this should reboot and on reboot we should have a working desktop and here we are with our boot screen automatically boot in and this is going to look a lot like linux mint but you'll notice it doesn't have as many packages as linux mint and we also change up like the boot screen and things like that so let's log in and we're presented with all the stuff you would normally see in a full linux mint obviously we're going to change a couple things like obviously fixing the resolutions first go to our preferences and display and then we can select like a 1080p should be good or i might just do 720 just so we have a little bit more of a blown up view um actually we're gonna go here and keep this configuration so now we have our settings done we have a very mint-esque look and feel to it obviously you can change a lot of the look and feel here but the reason why i really like this system is one we can change a lot of different things here let's just do an apt install neofetch and we'll just do a neo fetch to see so this is about 1800 packages i think linux mints in the 2000 mid-2000s on install so quite a bit less packages to get functional same system obviously which is really really nice and i'm going to just change a little couple things that why we start this way why it's the right way is because we're starting from a really good base we get to pick out pretty much everything we want with the system i would probably install like time shift for backup because linux mint has time shift out of the box so let's say something does go wrong with your system i would actually recommend having like a mint iso just because it has such a good tool set it's just some people won't use all those tools and it's just so nice to have a really nice clean slate right out of the gate but why i say don't install this as a noob because you're not going to know what you're going to want so having a mint or papa west those are really good for for folks that just don't know what they they want and you can kind of kind of keep inventory of all the programs you use on those systems and that way when you do a fresh clean slate like we're seeing with debbie in here you'll have all the programs that you use but not all the extra stuff that you don't now that we've had this we still can make a couple changes which i'm going to do right now to get it a little bit more up to date first off i'm going to change the preferences on our terminal because wow i think i'm making people blind by this so let's uh let's just go with like a green on black uh it's pretty pretty solid uh and then you know let's change the look and feel a little bit too and we'll go just go down to preferences themes for that and themes let's change this default and actually i think we can probably add and remove here yeah let's just go with a nokto download that guy that looks like a solid one and we'll come back to our themes and we'll just click this select that uh i guess we'll leave that with ottawa and that and yeah that sounds good to me and theme this out a little bit probably for icons i would change that to like a papyrus but it's kind of neat that you can kind of select a lot of this stuff so right here uh just doing an apt update we've already installed like neo fetch just so you can see that you can see that everything's already up to date which is kind of nice doing it this method you don't have like the double update and upgrade sections um but we can even make this even faster we will just go do like a vim of apt and sources.list or you could do like nano if if you want to use nano i really like them so i'm going to use them either way any editor will work here so now we can just do our vim and we can see all the bookmark ones right here i'm gonna change this around a little bit uh just to kind of show a couple different things so let's say you want to be a little bit more bleeding edge instead of book uh bookworm which is the latest version of debian i don't think it's quite released it's in testing right now uh we're gonna go to sid and that's like the development branch so you get a little bit uh newer packages by doing this but you'll still see it's not like a crazy amount i bet we get like maybe a thousand packages uh to update but let's see yeah actually it's about a hundred packages going from testing to sid so really not that big of a change here i'm also going to make one change this is actually going to be a future video instead of using this uh old mirror i actually have a special mirror and i'll probably do like a little how-to article running your own linux mirror i might label that video as hey you should do this before the end of the world happens because this means i would download every package known to man that debian has to offer as of it actually updates itself so instead of going out to the internet to install packages and update things i have an entire localized uh debian mirror so we'll upgrade this just do an upgrade you see the download for this is uh substantial about 127 megabytes a second so that's why i run my local mirror i install linux so much that i just like that but anyways we switched the sid branch now obviously you're not going to change to a local mirror unless you're crazy like me and now we're just gonna do a base install of this all right and there we go so this is all done uh we can give it a little reboot just so you can see that and we'll just hit restart and we'll select that on startup we can even remove like the boot menu you know all this just gives you a really good base and there we go so this is uh what you get you do have like a browser a couple little things like obviously thunderbird for email some basic games you got libreoffice installed by default still a little bit more bloat than i'd like but it does give you just the bare necessities with just a good tool set right out of the gate now if you didn't want all these tools installed on the get go you could actually take off a lot of this during the install process but it does complicate things so i wanted to show the base install for folks and then you can call it down after the fax so like let's say there's something in here that you did not like like let's say a lot of these games you could actually come in here and remove a lot of these uh by either purging it from terminal or using so coming from an administration software you can actually come through here and let's say you wanted to uninstall some of these games and we'll just authenticate uninstall solitaire i don't have like a cd writer here we could remove that and just kind of flip through uninstall the things that you're not going to use and just get like a really basic system to build on and you'll notice that it's going to run really fast it's going to be very intuitive just like linux mint is out of the box but after uninstalling all that you have this perfect base system to work with i encourage people to try this out pick whatever desktop environment you like and then install it from this section if you're familiar with debian now you can do the same thing with fedora you can do the same thing with the arch obviously arch kind of is built for this and that's the the beauty of this kind of layout instead of just doing distributions where a lot of people will distro hop i think that's fine in the beginning just so you can understand what programs you like and don't like and what desktop environments you like and don't like but once you actually start to gain some knowledge a lot of these branch distributions hey titus look at this distribution i don't even care because i can do and make everything in that distribution without all the garbage that comes with it or the stuff i shouldn't say garbage the stuff i don't use and then i have a system that literally has everything i need and only that which is kind of the beauty of linux the beauty of computing and how i like to use my computers even when i'm on windows i try to de-bloat as much as i possibly can and you know same with mac i like to try and cut off a lot of those built-in apps and stuff that come with it it's just a good way of working on a computer you get more from it so with that let me know your thoughts down in the comments section below and i'll see you in the next one

Channel: Chris Titus Tech

Views: 389,813

Keywords: chris titus tech, how to install debian linux, intermediate linux installation, finding the right debian iso

Id: CJ41KZ0fBMc

Length: 18min 43sec (1123 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 06 2022