Warning !
If you have a videocard with an ATI (AMD) or NVidia GPU (like ATI Radeon or NVidia Geforce) DO NOT install the "official" drivers fron ATI or NVidia
the NVidia driver (at least at this moment) is NOT complatible with the Realtime kernel we will be using and from experience the ATI drivers also cause problems.
Having that said let's start with the setup and upgrade of Debian
note: you can skip the upgrade by downloading the Debian testing ISO and install with that instead of the stable netinstall ISO but that setup process is a bit different from the stable one and it's a bit harder if you don't know what to do.
1. since we don't use the root account we will need root permissions to install software or do some more maintenance tasks. so the first thing we are going to do is to setup sudo (note, if you've installed Ubuntu or a Ubuntu based distro sudo is already setup)
to do this we do the following :
- press <Control> + >Alt> + <F1> (you can use F1 through F6)
-- this should give you a black screen with white tekst.
- login with the username "root"
- enter the password you have setup during installation
- type the command : "visudo"
-- scroll down with the arrow keys until you see : "root ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL"
-- Just add a new row and replace root with your username so it looks like
root ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL
user ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL
-- press <Control> + O (and press <Enter> to confirm
-- press <Control> + X
now verify if it's working
-- type : "exit"
-- login with your "regular" username and password
-- type : "sudo apt-get update"
-- enter your password
-- you should see APT updating the repositories
with this done we can perform maintenance tasks without needing to switch users every time
Now we are going to upgrade from Weezy to Jessie (my system doesn't recognize my USB-Interface in Weezy so I need to upgrade to Jessie)
- Press <Control> + <Alt> + >F7>
-- This should return you to Gnome (the GUI or Graphical User Interface)
-- Look in the menu for a program called "Terminal")
--this should open a window with a CLI (command-line interface)
-- enter the following commands :
-- "sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list" (this should ask your password and then opens Gedit to open the file "sources.list"
-- sources.list contains the repository information where Debian downloads it's sofrware from.
-- just replace the name weezy into jessie (for all entries) you can also use testing instead of Jessie but let's just use testing.
-- save and close
now go back to the CLI by pressing <Control> + >Alt> + <F1> (you can also edit /etc/apt/sources.list without going to the GUI but that requires the use of an editor like VI and while VI or Vim are very powerfull they are also not easy to use without knowing how they work.
next we'll be closing the running GUI (I prefer to do this when doing a major upgrade like this).
-- type : "sudo /etc/init.d/gdm3 stop" (you should see a message that gdm3 is stopped)
-- type : "sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade && sudo apt-get autoremove && sudo apt-get clean" this will update the package list -> Install the new upgrades -> remove programs that are no longer needed -> clean the apt folder (to get some free space).
this process will take a long time
when you get a message about restarting services let it do this automatically
when you get a list of changes press "q" to quit and continue
if there are no errors you are now running Debian 8.0 codename Jessie
now reboot by typing : "sudo reboot;"
After the reboot you should get the GDM3 login screen and Gnome after entering the correct username/password combination.
Congratulations.
Play around a bit to get to learn how Gnome works (this is a newer version that works a bit different compared to the version that comes with Wheezy).
Next tutorial will be installing a new kernel and optimizing for Realtime Low Latency
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