Debian 13 question

[superbuu]

When installing Debian 13, if you install it like this:

 

With the default settings, just by clicking on "Guided - use entire disk and set up encrypted LVM" will all the partitions be encrypted? Or only the big data partition? Because then data could leak into swap partition, boot partition and whatever

 

Also what about the default swap partition size? Do you bother changing it like that dude or leave it as default?

I have found this guide here that installs Debian 12 encrypted including boot, anyone knows if you can follow this step by step as seen on the screenshots and not screw up if you do this with Debian 13?

https://www.reddit.com/r/debian/comments/146vw37/comment/lbcn0h3/

Please reply as if I have no idea what im doing, which is the case. I already looked at the documentation, it's too convoluted to understand. The only thing i got done so far is, I downloaded debian-13.0.0-amd64-DVD-1.iso and burned it on a DVD. Now I just need to figure this out before installing.

[Biohazard777]

2 minutes ago, superbuu said:

Also what about the default swap partition size? Do you bother changing it like that dude or leave it as default?

I disable the swap partition and I swap to file, because:
- I never let my drives get 100% full, so there is always plenty of space for the swap file... reserving drive space just for the swap partition is a waste IMO.
- Also if your data partition is encrypted, swapping to file = also encrypted.

Don't have the time right now to check out the video and your other questions, hopefully someone else will chime in.

[Thomas53]

What use entire is exactly what it says, it uses the entire disk to install the OS

Read above for security and swap, as I 150% agree.

All that you need to do is boot the disk and after the Desktop appears, press "Install" and answer a few questions and when prompted connect to the web then go make yourself a pot of coffee and by the time you get back, it'll be finished, unless you have a very slow system like a 386 or 8086 system.

The installer is smart enough to do everything it needs to do with no changes necessary, even if you have more than one user as they can be added prior to installation.

 

If you have another OS, usually Windows, and you want to dual boot you will be given the choice prior to installation.

 

After rebooting, you'll need to update the system. Here you'll have time to get your coffee and start to enjoy it.

 

Even with a slow system and wifi, it shouldn't take more that 15 -20 minutes for everything.

[superbuu]

1 hour ago, Thomas53 said:

What use entire is exactly what it says, it uses the entire disk to install the OS

Read above for security and swap, as I 150% agree.

All that you need to do is boot the disk and after the Desktop appears, press "Install" and answer a few questions and when prompted connect to the web then go make yourself a pot of coffee and by the time you get back, it'll be finished, unless you have a very slow system like a 386 or 8086 system.

The installer is smart enough to do everything it needs to do with no changes necessary, even if you have more than one user as they can be added prior to installation.

 

If you have another OS, usually Windows, and you want to dual boot you will be given the choice prior to installation.

 

After rebooting, you'll need to update the system. Here you'll have time to get your coffee and start to enjoy it.

 

Even with a slow system and wifi, it shouldn't take more that 15 -20 minutes for everything.

RIght so assume you just select the encrypted option and you are good to go. And now my question is, if you are using debian-13.0.0-amd64-DVD-1.iso you still need an internet connection? That is supposed to be the offline installer. It's 3.7GB, doesn't it cointain everything?

Btw, is there a way to have the desktop like on windows? I mean with "My Computer" and documents, etc etc. And the menu below to open stuff. Because from the videos i've seen you have a blank desktop which seems pretty useless, then you have to do this insanely annoying routine of clicking on some button on the top left of the screen, then go all the way back down and click there to open the list of programs.

 

 

[Thomas53]

No, you don't need an internet connection to install Debian, as you'll get a running system. But, and this honestly is a big BUT,  depending on some hardware, internal and external , you're may not be able to use them or only have basic functionality for them.

 

All of this however, will be taken care of when you are able to go online, this include any updates released after your .iso was downloaded.

 

You can click open your file manager and either drag the directory's icon into the Desktop icon or directly onto the Desktop itself (same end result just using different ways), or better,

Right click on the directory icon and under 'Send To' choose 'Create Desktop Link'. An icon with an arrow will then appear (the arrow shows that its a shortcut and not the directory itself.) This method leaves the directory in it's default location and doesn't make it a sub-directory under the main Desktop directory.

 

You can also use these methods for files and commonly used applications.

But since I only commonly use 6 applications, I have the icons placed on the panel, for a cleaner desktop.

[Eigenvektor]

2 hours ago, superbuu said:

RIght so assume you just select the encrypted option and you are good to go. And now my question is, if you are using debian-13.0.0-amd64-DVD-1.iso you still need an internet connection? That is supposed to be the offline installer. It's 3.7GB, doesn't it cointain everything?

It contains everything you need to install the system and a lot of common software packages. It doesn't include absolutely everything, more obscure software will have to wait until you've got an internet connection.

 

~edit:

https://www.debian.org/mirror/size

This site shows you how much software there's available in total in the Debian archives per architecture. If you wanted to include absolutely every possible program available for amd64 (x86_64) alone, that would be 634 GB. But there's no reason to include all of that in the initial download/DVD, since software needed beyond the basics will vary greatly from person to person.

[NoLeafClover]

9 hours ago, superbuu said:

With the default settings, just by clicking on "Guided - use entire disk and set up encrypted LVM" will all the partitions be encrypted? Or only the big data partition? Because then data could leak into swap partition, boot partition and whatever

You can see the resultant structure at 2:00 of the video. The first two partitions (ESP and /boot) are unencrypted, this is normal and there's nothing unusual here. The third partition is an encrypted LVM container that contains one 17GB volume for swap and the rest is dedicated to the root (/) filesystem.

 

Speaking of partition layout, having just one large data partition is not great. Strongly suggest separating root (/) from user data (e.g. /home). I'm surprised the installer doesn't do this by default.

 

9 hours ago, superbuu said:

Also what about the default swap partition size? Do you bother changing it like that dude or leave it as default?

It depends. If you need hibernation you will need to have a generous swap size to fit all your memory contents. The default will often be large enough. If you don't need hibernation and you have decent amounts of ram, you can do away with swap altogether. You can also use zram, which is a compressed portion of memory that acts as virtual swap space - this can be useful on all systems regardless of ram size. For example, if you have 8 GiB of ram, 4 of which is allocated to Zram, then once your ram fills over 4GiB, least recently used pages will be moved to the Zram part and compressed on the fly. This is generally much faster than swapping. 

 

As already pointed out you can also use a swap file. There are generally 3 most common scenarios:

1. Physical swap partition(s), i.e. standard drive partition
2. Swap volume(s) in LVM
3. Swap file(s)

All can be encrypted. Option (1) is perhaps the most "robust" as it operates directly at the hard drive block layer, but also least flexible as changing physical drive partitions is a PITA, especially if you have encrypted partitions (which you should) that cannot be easily moved or resized. It also needs a bit of extra configuration to encrypt on the fly. Option (2) is fairly standard these days, and this is what is in the video you shared. If LVM is encrypted, you benefit from that indirectly. With swap being a regular LVM volume, resizing is a fairly trivial task. Option (3) is perhaps less common, but also doable. It may seem easier to deal with when it comes to size, but there are caveats - it will operate on top of the file system, so a file system corruption could also corrupt the swap file. If using a Copy-on-Write (COW) file system such as Btrfs you will need to explicitly disable COW on the swap file.

 

Personally, I don't use hibernate so having a large swap space is, for me, pointless use of drive space. I have a token amount of swap space in the unlikely scenario that I run out of RAM, and this is also backed by a few GiB of Zram compression which will take precedence over swap. I use option (2) as IMHO it provides a good balance between risk (not having to deal with the filesystem layer) and flexibility (easy to resize). Because it's only a few GiB on a 2TiB drive, I don't really care - I'm never going to allocate less. Note that you can have multiple swap spaces, and mix and match. For example, you could allocate a 2 GiB swap volume on LVM that is small enough to act as a short term "buffer" and if you need more also allocate a [much] larger swap file. IIRC hibernate can only resume from one location, i.e. you can't "spread" a hibernation state over multiple swap sources, so keep that in mind (somebody correct me if wrong).

 

TL;DR - if you don't need hibernate, keep swap small depending on RAM size. For 16 GiB RAM or more, you can simply do away with it on a machine used for common day-to-day things.

 

7 hours ago, superbuu said:

Btw, is there a way to have the desktop like on windows? I mean with "My Computer" and documents, etc etc. And the menu below to open stuff.

This depends on the desktop environment (Gnome, KDE, Xfce etc). Most will allow you to create shortcuts and widgets. Sometimes (e.g. KDE) it may need to be enabled by changing the desktop layout from "Desktop" to "Folder view" or something of the kind.

[superbuu]

Thanks, I will just use LXQt, it has that nice old Windows layout, looks simple and efficient.  I will install GNOME and a few others nontheless and test them. But I doubt I will use GNOME. It looks too fancy, almost designed for touchscreens or something. How do you switch between interfaces? I think there was a command line or something.

As far as the partitions, I will just use whatever the Guided encrypted option gives.

[Eigenvektor]

8 hours ago, NoLeafClover said:

Speaking of partition layout, having just one large data partition is not great. Strongly suggest separating root (/) from user data (e.g. /home). I'm surprised the installer doesn't do this by default.

It adds additional complexity for more novice users. How big should I make each partition at a minimum? What if I made it too small and run out of space later?

 

It is good practice, but if you don't have experience with how much you need and how to deal with things if you misjudged, using a single partition is probably the safer router. Anyone "in the know" can easily change the option to their needs.

[Thomas53]

Gnome is one of the original DE's and was out a LONG time before there were even touchscreen phones.

[NoLeafClover]

2 hours ago, Eigenvektor said:

It adds additional complexity for more novice users. How big should I make each partition at a minimum? What if I made it too small and run out of space later?

 

It is good practice, but if you don't have experience with how much you need and how to deal with things if you misjudged, using a single partition is probably the safer router. Anyone "in the know" can easily change the option to their needs.

Agree. I only mentioned it as I was surprised that the installer doesn't do any of it by default. Depending on the disk space available there are many heuristics that the installer could use to create a better default. Some possibilities that the installer could use are:

• If free space < N GiB, use single partition
  • Maybe default to Btrfs and split /home as separate sub-volume
• Default to at most N GiB (e.g. 128) for / and leave rest for /home
• Opt for 50/50 split if space for / is going to be no less than N GiB

 

2 hours ago, superbuu said:

As far as the partitions, I will just use whatever the Guided encrypted option gives.

That's absolutely fine. Since the default is already using LVM, you can always resize and adapt your volume layout at a later point, if you choose to do so, without having to do a full reinstall. 

 

2 hours ago, superbuu said:

How do you switch between interfaces? I think there was a command line or something.

Normally, the login "manager", a fancy word for the software that provides the login screen, will give you the option to choose the kind of "session" you want. But beware it may be a drop down menu in random corner of the screen. It sounds vague because the various desktop environments will often provide a separate login manager. KDE uses "sddm", GNOME uses "gdm", Xfce, I think, uses "lightdm". They all kind of function the same but may have different layout. I suspect whichever one is installed first will likely take precedence.