–Minimal Installation–
This info is for the most minimal server installation possible, for a system that is intended to run headless or support console only.
Go get the lastest Debian 7.0 netinst image suitable for your target architecture. Since its presently (today is 2013.01.17) in the “testing” branch it can be found here (note that when it is officially released it will move to stable and will then be available here).
Choose “Expert” install.
I do everything standard except:
I partition the disk manually, and create one large ext4 partition from the entire disk. There is one option special option I choose: noatime which increases performance. It will complain that there is no swap partition. Just ignore the complaints and say yes. Later I install dphys-swapfile which dynamically creates a swapfile and in my opinion is better than having a swap partition.
When it comes to the choice of selecting software (tasksel), do not select anything, not Laptop, File Server, nor any other ones including even Standard System Utilities. All choices should be left blank.
At the very end, after it has installed the Grub boot loader to the hard disk, it will ask if you are finished. Now press ctrl-alt-f2 to switch to a fresh console.
Now one can install some important and key things. The normal apt-get command is not available in the installation console. The command to use is instead is apt-install:
apt-install dphys-swapfile vim less dnsutils bind9-host ssh rsync lsof mlocate file manpages sudo acpid pm-utils apmd cpufrequtils
Etc. I’m sure there are some other important things missing but this is the general idea.
I discovered that installing the innocuous-sounding acpi-support drags in a whole ton of crap including xscreensaver, avahi garbage, hicolor-icon-theme, etc. Therefore DO NOT install it.
–Cool tweaks–
Install netselect-apt and run netselect-apt wheezy which will test for the fast available repository and create a sources.list for it.
Run dpkg-reconfigure -plow console-setup and select the defaults except for the font for console select Terminus and then for font size play around with different sizes. on my 1400×1050 display the 12×24 framebuffer-only font looks amazing.
Install hwinfo and then run hwinfo --framebuffer and look for the higest resolution mode listed. The line will start with something like “Mode 0x0344”. Now edit /etc/default/grub and append “vga=0x0344” (change to whatever resolution is suitable for your monitor) to the end of the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT line, right after “quiet” . So the line should look like:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet vga=0x0344"
then run update-grub.
–Other things–
For compiling things usually these are needed:
build-essentials
linux-headers-$(uname -r)
Make life with sudo easier:
after the line:
root ALL=(ALL) ALL
add:
$USER ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL
where $USER is the username.
Set up a mount for an external drive with the UUID:
blkid /dev/sdb1
then something like this in /etc/fstab:
UUID="4924003b-fbbb-40b0-a23a-6908ff1941c3" /mnt/data1 ext3 noatime,errors=remount-ro 0 1
–Useful references–
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