One of the my projects this week has been getting Debian 13 (the current release) installed on a new external SSD. It would be fair to say that it has made use of my technical skills but it is up and working now. Two particular wrinkles that I note for future reference:
- I tried running a net install from a small USB stick and a live install on the drive itself. What I finally had to do (on attempt #3, a live install from a larger USB stick with the new drive connected) was to install GParted on the running version and format the new drive to ext4. Finally I was able to select it as the target for partitioning with the installer (including putting the Linux MBR on the SSD so as not to interfere with the Windows install on the laptop)
- Because it is hooked to the same laptop, it has the same IP address on my network. In turn that creates a problem connecting via SSH as each of my Debian installs has a different host name and internal configuration. Since I want to keep them distinct, I did some experimenting and found that I could connect via SSH using the host name of one and the IP address of the other. They both share that address but only one will be running at a time.
I’m sure I’ll have a few more technical challenges but those were the ones that caused some head scratching but did get solved this week.