Starting up

But beware: your computer’s BIOS must be configured to boot from either a DVD or a USB stick, depending on your choice. On some computers, one of the F8, F9 or F10 keys is used to select the boot device. For more information, we recommend you read the dedicated boot pages on the Debian and Ubuntu websites.

Choose your language for installing Emmabuntüs DE 5 using the navigation arrows :

After pressing Enter, the next screen gives you several choices, either to test or to install this version of Emmabuntüs.

If you prefer the direct, classic Debian installation, select the line Install Emmabuntüs (Classic installation) and go directly to section #3.3 of this document.

In this section, however, we’re going to use a live session and the Calamares tool to install the new system.

So first click on the line Try without installing, or install with Calamares, then press Enter:

The Live session will first be installed, and then you can launch Calamares

The Calamares Installer

When the live session is up and running double-click on the Calamares icon located on the Emmabuntüs desktop :

Language selection

So, in this section, we’ve chosen Classic Installation mode, and within the installer welcome window you have the opportunity to change the application and system language :

Click on the drop-down menu arrow to select the new language, then click Next.

You can click on the map to choose your city. Alternatively, you can choose your region and zone, using the drop-down menus:

Manual partitioning and multi-boot

This procedure is absolutely not recommended for beginners, it is intended for experienced users who want to have several operating systems coexisting in parallel on their computers. For the beginners who wants to test several operating systems, we recommend they use a dedicated computer for the alternative OS, or to use different hard disks, but never test several operating systems on their daily work computer because a terrible cockpit error can occur very quickly 🙁 .

Choose a partition containing an operating system (here partition number 1), which can be reduced to make room for the partition next to it, which will contain Emmabuntüs Debian Edition. Then Validate.

Select the resizing operation, and Validate

Accept to start the resizing process, check Yes, then Validate.

Enter the new size of the current partition after downsizing and Validate.

Define the type of this new partition and Validate:

You return to the partitioning tool home menu. If, as in our example, the swap partition is not used as a swap (here the usage field is empty), double-click to modify it.

Alternatively, you can select the line Finish partitioning … and Validate.

Here we are going to modify the swap partition, by double-clicking on Use as :

and in the selection window that opens, double-click on “swap”.

and on Done setting up this partition :

System installation

If you have confirmed the previous step, partitioning is applied and the system installs itself on the disk, starting by copying the data:

During the final phase of the installation, you are asked if you want to use a mirror to update your system. tick “Yes” and Continue :

To improve the speed of the future package updates, you are then asked which country you leave in :

And as suggested, the deb.debian.org mirror is an excellent choice:

Usually, you don’t use an HTTP proxy and you should leave this field empty:

The installation program continues configuring the package manager, first by scanning the mirror, then by retrieving the various files:

The Grub starter

This brings us to the Grub installation, which is an important step, as it will determine whether or not the machine can be restarted.
The installer examines the system configuration to check whether other systems have already been installed:

Only one operating system has been found here. This is obviously the one you are installing. Select the Yes option and Continue.

• Multi-boot case :

Another system has been detected.
In this case, too, we advise beginners to answer Yes to this question, in order to install the GRUB on the disk where you’ve just installed your new Debian Emmabuntüs.

If you’re more experienced, you can answer No to this question, in order to install your GRUB in the partition on which you’ve just installed your new Debian Emmabuntüs. But remember that after a reboot, you’ll need to link your GRUBs in your master operating system, so that all operating systems are visible when your computer starts up.

Now select the hard disk on which you have installed your new Debian Emmabuntüs:

Clock setting

Then select UTC for the clock (unless you are installing a dual-boot with Windows):

Finishing installation

The installation process is finishing…

and you can now restart your computer. Click on Continue :

Post-installation under Xfce

On first system boot, the loading screen appears: you can now begin the post-installation process of Emmabuntüs Debian Edition 5.

Premier démarrage

Once the installation is complete, your computer automatically reboots to your new Emmabuntüs DE 5 system, and the GRUB screen appears:

In general, you don’t have to do anything on the GRUB start-up screen, except perhaps immediately validate the selected line by pressing Enter, rather than waiting the 5 seconds or so it will take the system to do it for you.
On the other hand, from this screen, by validating the Advanced Options for Debian GNU/Linux 12 … line

and then selecting the Debian … (recovery mode) line, you can start your system in recovery mode, to repair or unblock it if, for example, updates have been inadvertently stopped during installation.

Inside this menu, navigate using the up/down arrows on the keyboard, then press TAB to reach the OK field and Enter to validate.

We’re back to our normal Emmabuntüs DE 5 system start-up, and the first window to appear is the log-in window, where you’ll need to enter your password and click on the Log in button:

And then the post-installation welcome screen:

Here we continue the post-installation under the XFCE environment.
You can also jump to the Using the LXQt desktop environment section.

Desktop setup

This first customization screen lets you configure your desktop environment.

Here you choose :

• your Xfce menu: Classic or Whisker;

• your screen background images for sleep mode;

• your desktop background image;

• the activation of text-to-speech service at every computer startup;

• Log on automatically at startup or keep your session password-protected.

Desktop setup (continuation)

More desktop settings to come :

Dock level

Configuration for the dock located at the very bottom of the screen. You are invited to choose between three possible configurations: “Complete“, “Simple“, “Basic“, or to click on Cancel to prevent the dock from launching automatically on system start-up.

Installing non-free software

This screen gives you the choice of whether or not to install certain non-free software, including some Microsoft fonts.
You need to check the boxes of the non-free software you want to install and click OK:

You can refuse the installation of the non-free software, or select just a few. You can also install them later from the Maintenance menu in the dock at the bottom of the screen.

In this example, and after a Repository Update

the Codecs installation takes place :

Deleting unused languages

Next comes the opportunity to remove languages that will not be used on this system:

We strongly advise you to remove unused languages to reduce the number of updates, and also to install the complementary add-ons for the language you’re using. Don’t miss this step!

French language being removed :

If you follow this example and click on the OK button, you will need to enter your administrator password:

then a terminal window will open, where you can follow the software installation:

You will then be asked to define the login for your administration account:

and the associated password (to be entered twice, as usual):

The system will take some time to finalize the CTparental install and you will eventually see the success message. Simply click on OK to complete this post-installation step:

For more information on parental control, see our tutorial on the subject.

Installation complete

You’re now ready to start using your new Emmabuntüs Debian Edition 5 system.

If your computer is connected to the Internet, you should be able to use the available updates. Simply select Dock => Maintenance (1) => Update Manager (2).

and, in the window that opens, simply click on Install Updates and let the program do the rest.

You will probably need to authenticate yourself:

and a new reboot might be necessary, for example to take a new kernel into account.

Using the LXQt desktop environment

You may find that the Xfce desktop environment isn’t responsive enough and consumes too much RAM for your computer’s hardware configuration. There’s still one way to make your PC more user-friendly: switch to the LXQt desktop environment, included with Emmabuntüs, although you will lose some of the features present in the Xfce environment.

Disconnect from the Xfce session and connect with LXQt

To disconnect from your session, click on your username (here Emmabuntus) at the top right of the screen, then on the ‘Log Out …’ command within the drop-down menu that opens:

In the next sub-window, click on the large Log Out button to confirm this action:

Welcome to your new LXQt lightweight desktop environment:

LXQt, your new lightweight desktop environment

When you start up for the first time under LXQt, you are offered a “Post-installation” phase similar to that described for the Xfce environment, see the Desktop setup section.

Using the Dock

You can use the Cairo-dock under LXQt, providing you have enough RAM available.
To do so, select the Cairo-dock category, then Activate/Deactivate Emmabuntus Dock :

Memory consumption under LXQt

If you run the Htop system utility, you’ll see that the LXQt environment consumes just 465 MB at startup for 32-bit Emmabuntüs DE 5.

If you run now simultaneously the Falkon browser, the PCManFM-Qt file manager, the FeatherPad text editor and the Htop system utility, you’ll see a memory consumption of 731 MB. We therefore recommend that you use a computer with at least 1 GB RAM.

No free lunch: This lightweight optimization of Emmabuntüs with LXQt means that you lose some of the features present in the heavier but more complete Xfce.

Installing Wine and PlayOnLinux

To stay within the 4GB limit, Wine and PlayOnLinux are no longer part of the 64-bit and 32-bit distributions, but it’s very easy to install them when you have an Internet connection.
In a terminal, run the following four commands for a 64-bit version and only the last one for a 32-bit version:

sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y -qq wine32
sudo apt install -y -qq wine winetricks fonts-wine libwine playonlinux

How to create a bootable Live-USB-stick for Emmabuntüs DE

To create a bootable USB stick, we’re going to suggest two tools, Ventoy and balenaEtcher, which run on both Linux and Windows, and a third solution based on the Linux command-line only.

With the Ventoy tool

Ventoy is an open-source software that will make your life much easier when it comes to creating bootable USB disks. Thanks to Ventoy, you can turn your USB stick into an operating system installation station, while also preserving its properties as a storage medium.

Installation

Go to the download page: https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy/releases
then scroll down to the Assets section:

1. 1. under GNU/Linux you download ventoy-x.x.xx.linux.targ.gz

   2. under Windows you take ventoy-x.x.xx.windows.zip

Installation under GNU/Linux

Right-click on the downloaded file and select the Extract here command:

A new folder is created (here it’s ventoy-1.0.95) containing 4 different launchers called VentoyGUI.xxxx and corresponding to the different architectures available under Linux :

On a conventional computer, with a 64-bit architecture use the X86_64 launcher, and with a 32-bit architecture use the i386 launcher. Other architectures are for ARM and MIPS processors. You can find out which architecture is used on your computer by typing the following command in a terminal: dpkg –print-architecture

Depending on your operating system, double-click on the appropriate launcher and enter your password.

Installation under Windows

Once the installation file is downloaded, right-click on it and the Extract all … command

Enter the full destination path for extraction, then click on Extract:

Within the created folder, double-click on Ventoy2Disk.exe

Then click on Yes to authorize the execution of the Ventoy2Disk.exe application.

Using another language

English is the default language of the Ventoy2Disk window, but you can pick another language by clicking on the Language button:

and pick German, for example:

Preserving space

With the Ventoy stick, it is possible to preserve some space in the second part of the key, to install a data partition for example.
Click on the Option menu, then Partition Configuration:

Here we will reserve 40 GB for later use:

USB stick Initialization

All that’s left is to check that the device to be initialized is the USB stick you’ve plugged, then click on Install :

Download Etcher for Linux APPIMAGE (32 or 64 bits, depending on your system).

In our example, we’ve created an Applis folder to hold the downloaded file. Right-click on the file, then Properties…

In the Permissions tab of the Properties window, check the box: Allow this file to run as a program.

Then click on the Close button.

In the 32-bit version of Emmabuntüs DE 5, the balenaEtcher AppImage does not run as expected. You have to use a terminal and run the command below in administrator mode, ignoring the error messages that do not prevent the window from opening: sudo ./balenaEtcher-1.7.9-ia32.AppImage

Installation under Windows

In the usual way, double-click on the downloaded setup file:

Click on I Accept in the License Agreement window:

blkid

which will give you a result like :

/dev/sda1: LABEL="system" UUID="3d378712-1b6e-4f66-b9e8-2a6673c62199" TYPE="ext4" 
/dev/sdb1: UUID="F9B8-E691" TYPE="vfat"

Here, our key is identified as UUID=”F9B8-E691″, is formatted in “vfat” and contains the sdb1 partition. Make a note of this sdb1 so you don’t accidentally delete a partition on your internal hard disk (here, sda1).
The Debian ISO can be found in the Downloads folder. Let’s go there to work on this file:

cd /$HOME/Downloads

We’re now going to transfer the contents of the ISO to the USB stick using the dd command. Be sure to name the USB stick “sdb” and not “sdb1”, as it’s the disk that’s taken into account, not the partition, and change EmmaDE-xx.iso to the current name of the ISO to be transferred:

sudo dd if=EmmaDE-xx.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=4M && sync

The transfer time to your USB key depends on the size of the ISO and the transfer rate of your USB port. This operation may take 10 to 15 minutes with no sign of terminal activity. The terminal will “hand over” (display the command prompt) once the transfer is complete.

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Thanks to ideefixe who made the initial frame of this tutorial for the Emmabuntüs 1 & 2 distributions based on Ubuntu, and also to rodinux and Saby43 for their contributions to the elaboration of this Emmabuntüs Debian Edition tutorial.
Thanks to Zoom61 for his publishing assistance, and to f-leb for his spelling and syntax corrections during the initial release of Emmabuntüs DE on the Developpez.com site.
A big thank you to arpinux for his technical advises during the development of the Emma-DE distribution, the elaboration of this tutorial, and the one of “The beginner’s handbook”, which is really perfect for the beginners on Emma-DE and spare us the writing of a new tutorial on this very subject.
And a great tribute to Ian who left us prematurely, and without whom this new adventure won’t be possible. We will keep an eternal gratitude to him, for the whole of his work.

Drawing by Péhä – cc-0   : “In memory of Ian Murdock”