Installing Debian 6.0.10

Debian 6.0 has been superseded by Debian 7.0 (wheezy). Some of these installation images may no longer be available, or may no longer work, and you are recommended to install wheezy instead.

To install Debian 6.0.10 (squeeze), download any of the following images:

netinst CD image (generally 135-175 MB)

businesscard CD image (generally 20-50 MB)

full CD sets

full DVD sets

CD (via jigdo)

DVD (via jigdo)

Blu-ray (via jigdo)

other images (netboot, usb stick, etc.)

If any of the hardware in your system requires non-free firmware to be loaded with the device driver, you can use one of the tarballs of common firmware packages or download an unofficial image including these non-free firmwares. Instructions how to use the tarballs and general information about loading firmware during an installation can be found in the Installation Guide (see Documentation below).

netinst (generally 175-240 MB) non-free CD images with firmware

Notes

Documentation

If you read only one document before installing, read our Installation Howto, a quick walkthrough of the installation process. Other useful documentation includes:

Errata

This is a list of known problems in the installer shipped with Debian 6.0.10. If you have experienced a problem installing Debian and do not see your problem listed here, please send us an installation report describing the problem or check the wiki for other known problems.

Errata for release 6.0

Some sparc systems cannot be installed using CD-ROM
Debian installer for Squeeze does not include PATA kernel drivers, which makes it impossible to complete the installation from CD media on systems which require these drivers to access the CD-ROM drive (for example, Ultra 10), as the installer will fail to detect it. The problem may be worked around by netbooting the installer, thus eliminating the need to access CD-ROM drive during installation.
See #610906.
This will be fixed on the next Squeeze point release (6.0.1).
Possibly non-working detected USB braille devices
When letting the Debian Installer detect a plugged USB braille device, the latter may end up showing only "screen not in text mode". This is due to a potential race between detection and frame buffer start. A workaround is to pass brltty on the kernel command line to force detection.
See #611648.
No network driver for Sparc T2+
niu network driver, required by newer T2+ sparc systems is not included in d-i, making it impossible to install on them using any method which relies on early network setup. Driver is included in kernel packages, so network is expected to operate normally after installation is completed.
See #608516.
Systems using aty graphics cards may not boot the installer correctly
Systems using aty graphics cards (for example, Ultra 10) may not boot the installer correctly, with kernel freezing early in the boot stage with last message "console [tty0] enabled, bootconsole disabled". This is a kernel bug, for which a patch is available, however it may be not fully fixed.
The issue may be worked around by adding a kernel boot parameter 'video=atyfb:off' to turn off the framebuffer during boot, which allows the installer (and regular kernel) to be booted on such systems.
See #609466.
Keyboard selection, with graphical installer, does not work for some layouts
Preselection of keyboard is not working with graphical installations for some combinations (Bulgaria, Swiss German, Sweden and Brazilian). Also the choice made is not beind used, and the system defaults to American English (/etc/default/keyboard).
See #610843.
Potential installation problems with RTL8169-based network cards
The Debian installer may be unable to use network cards based on the RTL8169 family during the installation, which includes downloading packages during installation through these cards. The installed system is unaffected by the problem.
See #558316 and similar merged bugs.
This will be fixed on the next Squeeze point release (6.0.1).
Fails to boot after successful install on a btrfs root
The installation finishes as normal, but after reboot it results into an initramfs busybox prompt.
See #608538.
Windows is not added to the grub list
The Debian Installer detects Windows during installation but it not adds it to the grub boot menu. As workaround, after installing, run update-grub.
See #608025.
Makes incompatible partition table with Mac OS 9
It was reported that the partitioning tool in the installer makes the partition table unrecognizable by Mac OS 9 which no longer boots. Although the HFS+ partitions are compatible with Linux and Mac OS X it is advised to take all precautions when installing on a machine with Mac OS 9.
See #604134.
Partitioning fails on kFreeBSD
There are reports of failing partitioning on kFreeBSD. The problem seems to be related with partitions alignment / extended partitions.
See #593733, #597088 and #602129.
Network/Graphic/Storage card doesn't work properly
There is several hardware, notably network cards, graphic cards and storage controllers, that require binary non-free firmware to work properly.
Debian is commited to free software values and never make the system require non-free software (see Debian's Social Contract). So, non-free firmware is not included in the installer.
But if you want to load any external firmware during installation you are free to do it. The process is documented in the installation manual.
zipl installation problem that makes s390 uninstallable
If a dedicated partition for the /boot directory is created system-boot fails after installation if /boot is mounted before /.
See #519254.
Buggy routers may cause network problems
If you experience network problems during the installation, this may be caused by a router somewhere between you and the Debian mirror that doesn't correctly handle window scaling. See #401435 and this kerneltrap article for details.
You can work around this issue by disabling TCP window scaling. Activate a shell and enter the following command:
echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_window_scaling
For the installed system you should probably not completely disable TCP window scaling. The following command will set ranges for reading and writing that should work with almost any router:
echo 4096 65536 65536 >/proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_rmem
echo 4096 65536 65536 >/proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_wmem
Partitions overs 16TiB not supported by ext4
The ext4 file system creation tools do not support creating file systems over 16TiB in size.
s390: unsupported features
  • support for the DASD DIAG discipline is currently not available