Installing Debian GNU/Linux 5.0.3

To install Debian GNU/Linux 5.0.3 (lenny), download any of the following images:

If any of the hardware in your system requires firmware to be loaded with the device driver, you can use one of the tarballs of common firmware packages. 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).

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 GNU/Linux 5.0.3. 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 5.0

Auto-assembly of RAID arrays in rescue mode can corrupt data
Rescue mode should be used with great care when software RAID arrays were in use on the system to rescue. The rescue mode scripts automatically assemble arrays, which could lead to data corruption in the presence of invalid or obsolete RAID superblocks.
Corrupted display of messages in Dzongkha installs
When the password chosen for root and its confirmations do not match, the display of screens that follow is garbled, during installs in Dzongkha language (broken display of italic font).
Disk devices may change on reboot
On systems with multiple disk controllers, the kernel/udev may assign a different device node on reboot of the system than was used during installation due to difference in load order of drivers.
This can lead to failure to boot the system. In most cases this can be corrected by changing the bootloader configuration and /etc/fstab, possibly using the rescue mode of the installer.
Note however that this problem may occur again on subsequent boots.
Reboot problems when installing from a USB stick
The former problem may also happen when installing from a USB stick. Temporarily keeping the USB stick in place will allow you to boot the installed system and correct the bootloader configuration file. See #506263 for details about such workaround.
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
Not usable for installing Squeeze or Sid
Due to changes in the passwd package in testing and unstable, setting up a user account will fail. For details see #529475.
i386: various issues
The i386 port has some known issues in this release:
  • Due to an increase in the size of the Linux kernel, we are unable to provide installation images for installs from floppy disk.
  • We had at least one report about the installer crashing at the network hardware detection step on some Dell Inspiron laptops. See bug #509238 for details. A workaround seems to be booting the installer with the vga=771 parameter.
PowerPC: various issues
The PowerPC port has several issues in this release:
  • installation from floppy on OldWorld PowerMac is broken because no device node is created for the swim3 module and as miboot is not included
  • the snd-powermac module is no longer loaded by default as it will lock up some systems; you will need to add it to /etc/modules manually
s390: unsupported features
  • support for the DASD DIAG discipline is currently not available
  • support for LCS network interfaces is no longer available

Improved versions of the installation system are being developed for the next Debian release, and can also be used to install lenny. For details, see the Debian-Installer project page.