Since Debian’s Testing distro is at least as stable as what Ubuntu calls their ’stable’ release, it’s not particularly risky to run your laptop on Testing. I’ve been doing it for years. It occurred to me that it’s not terribly obvious how one goes about installing Debian’s Testing distro.

Before we begin, some good news: ANY PC will run Debian nicely. All the way from 500mhz CPU’s and 1.1GHZ machines all the way to recent quad-core machines. The key is to have about 1GB or more of RAM available. An old 500mhz desktops make great home file/print/scanner/backups/web servers. If you wish to run MythTV and record HD content, you will need at least a dual-core CPU.

Read on for the how-to!

One Step Back:

Debian doesn’t really do a great job at making it obvious which disk image you need. The vast majority of you need an image with i386 in the name. You want this one because you are changing from Microsoft Windows to Linux. The next group would be the users converting an older Mac with a PowerPC CPU. You want the file with PPC in the name.

Being a KDE user, Debian builds a single-cd installer that is just KDE. This makes things super-easy! Just look for the file with the CPU type and KDE in the name. For the vast majority of you that would be something like, debian-testing-i386-kde-CD.iso

There is more than one way to get onto the Debian Testing distro. I’m going to concentrate on downloading a Testing image and install.

Two Steps Forward:

1. Go to the weekly builds page. PowerPC user’s go here.
2a. If your CPU has a speed claim greater than 1 GHZ, then scroll all the way down and grab the debian-testing-CPU-TYPE-kde-CD-1.iso file.
2b. For older PC’s (~1 GHZ or slower), grab the other image at the bottom of the page, debian-testing-CPU-TYPE-xfce+lxde-CD-1.iso. XFCE4 as your window manager will keep things as fast as possible and it has tons of functionality.  At this time, LXDE is lighter still, but buggier than XFCE4.  So, choose XFCE4 from the session choices when logging in for the first time.

3. Wait while the image downloads.
4. After downloading, burn the CD image to a CD.
5. Boot the PC with the Debian Installer!

There are lots of how-to’s about installing Debian from this point forward, so use the Internet to get any other questions answered.