Inital steps required to Setup Debian for Proxmox on non standard hardware.
Install Debian following the standard installation steps. There are lots of guides for this, a good one and the one I used can be found here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MW96JuYLbIA but this guide (which is almost identical) will also work https://computingforgeeks.com/how-to-install-debian-operating-system/ if you are installing Debian on a laptop, (which is the point of this tutorial) then you need to download the version of Deb that has the required firmware for laptops. Its located here https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-including-firmware/current/amd64/iso-dvd/ and its called firmware-firmware-11.0.0-amd64-DVD-1.iso at the time of writing this tutorial.
During the installation install SSH and tools (bottom 2). And that’s it.
Now that Debian is installed and running, we need to get things setup to enable us to easily access the system remotely. We will do that in the next set of steps.
1. The first step is to set the IP address to static, I should note that we will be changing this setup later for clustering, but for now, we are just going to set up a static IP address to make things a little easier in our first few configuration steps. The process we will follow to do this is documented here https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/add-configure-set-up-static-ip-address-on-debianlinux/, but the steps are pretty straightforward.
2. Before we can do anything else, we need to log in to the machine via a remote terminal session. To do that, we need the IP address that has been assigned. There are two ways to find this; one is to log into your network router and then find the machine and its IP address in the IP address list; the other is to log in to the machine its self and issue the following command in the terminal because I have no way of knowing what router you have and your level of technical skill, I will go with option 2
3. So on your newly installed Debian, log in with your second user account (Root will not allow you to log in by default) and once you have the prompt, type the following command.
ip addr
Note: you should have the PC plugged into an ethernet connection to ensure it gets an IP address first. Wi-Fi wont work as its not setup.
4. We can see from the screenshot above that the IP address in this case is 10.110.10.111, we can also see the interface name, this is important, we may need that laiter. For now we can login to the machine using putty. Just enter the IP address into the Hostname field and select open. If putty has successfully connected for the first time, you will be presented with a certificate accept banner. Just hit accept and then we can move forward.
5. If you follow the tutorial I indicated earlier It recommends using the sudo command, however as this is a fresh install of Debian, sudo is not yet installed. We will get that working next, but in the mean time we will shell to the root account. We do that by issuing the command
su –
6. you will be prompted for the root user password. You will notice that the prompt changes to root@prox:~
7. Now we can edit the interfaces file to setup the network connections as we want. First step, issue the following command.
nano /etc/network/interfaces
8. When you open the interfaces file, you should see a default setup something like the following (yours will have different names for the network adapters)
# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
# The primary network interface
allow-hotplug enp0s25
iface enp0s25 inet dhcp
9. We need to change the allow-hotplug enp0s31f6 to be the following.
# The primary network interface
auto enp0s25
allow-hotplug enp0s25
iface enp0s25 inet static
address <your static IP address>
netmask <the relevant Netmask>
gateway <Network Gateway address>
dns-domain <your domain > # Leave our if not relevant
dns-nameservers <your DNS server address> # Leave our if not relevant
10. At the prompt issue the following command and log back in using the ip address you have just set.
reboot
Configure Source list and Sudo
1. log back in and issue the SU - command to telent to the root user
2. Next issue the following commands
apt update && apt upgrade
3. Now if your paying attention, you will have seen the following error
E: The repository’ cdrom://[Debian GNU/Linux 10.9.0 _Buster_ - Unofficial amd64 DVD Binary-1 with firmware 20210327-10:45] buster Release’ does not have a Release file.
N: Updating from such a repository can’t be done securely, and is therefore disabled by default.
4.So before we go any further lets fix this. Because it will come back and bite us laiter. we can edit the sources.txt file. Execute.
nano /etc/apt/sources.list
5. we need to comment out the cd reference
deb cdrom:[Debian GNU/Linux 10.9.0 _Buster_ - Unofficial amd64 DVD Binary-1 with firmware 20210327-10:45]/ buster contrib main non-free
and add the backport reference in its place
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian buster-backports main
once complete type Ctrl + X to exit and if prompted to save… do the math!
To confirm that all is well execute the following command
apt update && apt upgrade
6. Make sure there are no errors
7. Next, we need to install all the firmware libraries. Strictly speaking, this step isn’t required as I have successfully managed to get proxmox to work without it. Still, you will see similar errors to the following if you don’t when you get to the stage when you install Proxmox. So there is no harm in avoiding that.
W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/i915/kbl_huc_ver02_00_1810.bin for module i915
W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/i915/bxt_huc_ver01_07_1398.bin for module i915
W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/i915/skl_huc_ver01_07_1398.bin for module i915
Execute the following command
apt-get install firmware-linux-nonfree
The next step is optional, but highly recommended. if you use the su - commandthen strictly speaking you don’t need to install sudo. In any case some of the Proxmox install commands will not work with sudo anyway. and others wont work without it. so best to err on the side of caution as they say
8. Issue the following command
apt-get install sudo
9. now add the Prox user to the sudo group
gpasswd -a prox sudo