Mika/Notes/Computer Stuff/Debian Installation/X1 12th

I got X1 12th generation and installed Debian stable (12.8 Bookworm) with Ubuntu.

Step 0: Find a USB stick

My old thumdrive was broken; tried to see what the problem was with testdisk but couldn't make it work. And I found a pile of other USB sticks, so I used one of them (2GB?).

Step 1: Get image

Got the ISO from here

Step 2: Prepare the bootable USB

Don't just cp the iso file to the USB stick. Do:

dd if=debian-testing-amd64-DVD-1.iso of=(where the usb is like /dev/sda1; dmesg) bs=1M

This step takes a while.

Debian Bookworm as of July 2024 was supposed to have non-free firmware but it didn't work for me, so I used phone USB tethering to install extra things.

Step 4: Install Debian

Because of the missing non-free firmware, I got a lot of errors, I pushed it through half way a few times but aborted the installation each time; then I used USB tethering to get wifi and installed a newer kernel (added debian backport to source.list and got a newer version). Also added debian multimedia to the source.list.

Chose to clean the whole partition (replace with random bits) and the encrypted harddisk with LVM.

Step 5: Install the same packages as the old laptop

First get a list of installed packaged on the old computer.

dpkg --get-selections > /tmp/(file name like laptop name_dpkg_selections_dates)

Put the file online (like etherpad) and get the list on the new computer.

You need to install dselect.

dselect update

dpkg --set-selections <(file name)

dselect

Then click install in the menu. This took a bit of time (15GB for just the debian stuff).

After all this, the wifi still didn't work; the wifi adapter was not found. There was also no bluetooth.

A blog post suggested to get the latest firmware.

/sbin/update-initramfs -u

That didn't quite work. Still missing wifi adapter.

It turned out that the kernel was upgrated but the upgrade didn't get the latest firmware. So, ran:

apt install -t bookworm-backports install firmware-iwlwifi

-t is for specifying the source. This worked!

The audio wasn't working. Used the graphical Software update to update the firmare; reboot and it updates the firmare in the middle of the booting.

The speakers are still not working but by using USB-C, I can use audio. Good enough for now.