Installing linux

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Dual boot

You can have both windows and linux on your machine, each installed on a separate disk or partition, and choose which to start when booting. This configuration is called "dual boot", and the debian installation system can set it up during the hard drive partitioning stage of installation and setting up the bootloader.

Debian offers a windows program that will download and set up a 32 bit debian installer. You then only need to reboot the computer and choose between normal windows boot or booting the installation program. Let me know if still wurks (currently I have no machine with windows for testing it). You can find it here http://ftp.debian.org/debian/tools/win32-loader/stable/ and here http://goodbye-microsoft.com/.

Debian

Download

Download for your preferred medium from https://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/debian-installer/

If you are confused about whether your kernel is 32 or 64 bits, in linux do:

$ uname -m

x86_64 means a 64-bit kernel and i686 means a 32-bit kernel. In windows try this https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/827218

Note: you can install a 32-bit kernel on a 64-bit CPU. The fundamental difference between 32 and 64 bit systems is the size of memory addresses. In theory, a 32 bit system can not work with more than 4 GB of RAM (2³² bytes). In practice, it is possible to work around this by using the 686-pae kernel, so long as the processor handles the PAE (Physical Address Extension). There is a performance price to pay for this, so if you are installing on a server with a huge amount of RAM, use the 64 bit kernel.

To learn more about your CPU in linux do:

$ cat /proc/cpuinfo

For windows you can type dxdiag in the run box.

Verify

Verify the md5 or sha256 checksum of the downloaded .iso file linux with:

$ md5sum debian-8.1.0-amd64-DVD-1.iso

or for example:

$ sha256sum debian-8.1.0-amd64-DVD-1.iso

and compare the output with key listed for debian-8.1.0-amd64-DVD-1.iso in respectively http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/8.1.0/amd64/iso-dvd/MD5SUMS and http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/8.1.0/amd64/iso-dvd/SHA256SUMS Other checksums are also given.

Windows does not come with md5sum. There are command line utilities (md5sum.exe) and the version available from Cygwin is probably easiest to install and update. Once installed, Cygwin's md5sum behaves exactly as the md5sum described for linux above.

Verify all dowloaded iso's.

Standard install with MATE

Boot from the USB, CD- or DVD-ROM and in the Isolinux bootloader menu choose install:

Choose language (this sets language for both the installation process as well as for the to-be-installed linux):

Select location. It doesn't have to be where you actually are. And you can change it later. It sets what repositories you use, but even that can be changed later.