The debian-cd team provides builds of CD images using debian-installer
on the
Debian CD page.
For more information on where to get CDs, see Section 4.1, “Official Debian GNU/Linux CD/DVD-ROM Sets”.
Some installation methods require other images than CD images. Section 4.2.1, “Where to Find Installation Images” explains how to find images on Debian mirrors.
The subsections below will give the details about which images you should get for each possible means of installation.
The netinst CD image is a popular image which can be used to install
jessie with the debian-installer
. This image is intended to boot from CD and
install additional packages over a network; hence the name 'netinst'.
The image has the software components needed to run the installer and
the base packages to provide a minimal jessie system. If you'd
rather, you can get a full size CD image which will not need the network
to install. You only need the first CD of the set.
Download whichever type you prefer and burn it to a CD. To boot the CD, you may need to change your BIOS configuration, as explained in Section 3.6.1, “Invoking the BIOS Set-Up Menu”.
It's also possible to install from removable USB storage devices. For example a USB keychain can make a handy Debian install medium that you can take with you anywhere.
The easiest way to prepare your USB memory stick is to download
hd-media/boot.img.gz
, and use gunzip to extract the 1 GB
image from that file. Write this image directly to your memory stick, which
must be at least 1 GB in size. Of course this will destroy anything already
on the memory stick. Then mount the memory stick, which will now have a FAT
filesystem on it. Next, download a Debian netinst CD image, and copy that file
to the memory stick; any filename is ok as long as it ends in
.iso
.
There are other, more flexible ways to set up a memory stick to use the debian-installer, and it's possible to get it to work with smaller memory sticks. For details, see Section 4.3, “Preparing Files for USB Memory Stick Booting”.
Some BIOSes can boot USB storage directly, and some cannot. You may need to configure your BIOS to boot from a “removable drive” or even a “USB-ZIP” to get it to boot from the USB device. For helpful hints and details, see Section 5.1.1, “Booting from USB Memory Stick”.
It's also possible to boot debian-installer
completely from the net. The
various methods to netboot depend on your architecture and netboot setup.
The files in netboot/
can be used to netboot debian-installer
.
It's possible to boot the installer using no removable media, but just an
existing hard disk, which can have a different OS on it. Download
hd-media/initrd.gz
, hd-media/vmlinuz
,
and a Debian CD image to the top-level directory of the hard disk. Make sure
that the CD image has a filename ending in .iso
. Now
it's just a matter of booting linux with the initrd.