As the first step of the installation, select the language in which you want the installation process to take place. Some languages have variants available. Pick whichever variant applies to your geographic region.
The answers you provide will be used to pick the language which the installer will use, and to set a suitable keyboard layout.
If you selected language in Abschnitt 6.3.1, „Language Chooser“ which has more than one country associated with it (true for Chinese, English, French, and many other languages), you can specify the country here.
This selection may affect locale settings and later in the process, it will be used to pick the default timezone and appropriate Debian Mirror Server for your probably geographic location. If the choices made by the installer are not suitable, you can make a different choice.
Select a keyboard that conforms to the layout used for your national language, or select something close if the keyboard layout you want isn't represented. Once the system installation is complete, you'll be able to select a keyboard layout from a wider range of choices (run kbdconfig as root when you have completed the installation).
Move the highlight to the keyboard selection you desire and press Enter. Use the arrow keys to move the highlight — they are in the same place in all national language keyboard layouts, so they are independent of the keyboard configuration. An 'extended' keyboard is one with F1 through F10 keys along the top row.
As you enter this step, if the system detects that you have more than one network device, you'll be asked to choose which device will be your primary network interface, i.e. the one which you want to use for installation. The other interfaces won't be configured at this time. You may configure additional interfaces after installation is complete; see the interfaces(5) man page.
By default, debian-installer tries to configure your computer's network automatically via DHCP. If DHCP probe succeeds, you are done. If the probe fails, it may be caused by many factors ranging from unplugged network cable, to a misconfigured DHCP setup. Or maybe you don't have DHCP server in your local network at all. For further explanation check the error messages on the third console. In any case, you will be asked, if you want to retry, or if you want to perform manual setup. DHCP servers are sometimes really slow in their responses, so if you are sure everything is in place, try again.
The manual network setup in turn asks you number of questions about your network, notably IP address, Netmask, Gateway, Name server addresses, and a Hostname. Moreover, if you have a wireless network interface, you will be asked to provide your Wireless ESSID and a WEP key. Fill in the answers from Abschnitt 3.3, „Information You Will Need“.
Some technical details you might, or might not, find handy: the program assumes the network IP address is the bitwise-AND of your system's IP address and your netmask. It will guess the broadcast address is the bitwise OR of your system's IP address with the bitwise negation of the netmask. It will also guess your gateway. If you can't find any of these answers, use the system's guesses — you can change them once the system has been installed, if necessary, by editing /etc/network/interfaces. Alternatively, you can install etherconf, which will step you through your network setup.
Now it is time to partition your disks. If you are uncomfortable with partitioning, or just want to know more details, see Anhang A, Partitioning for Debian.
First you will be given the opportunity to automatically partition either an entire drive, or free space on a drive. If you do not want to autopartition, choose from the menu and skip to the next paragraph. Otherwise you will be asked if you want , or if you rather like to have a . Both schemes have their pros and cons, some of which are discussed in Anhang A, Partitioning for Debian. If you are unsure, choose the first one.
On the next screen you will see your partition table, how the partitions will be formatted, and where they will be mounted. If you did automatic partitioning, you should just be able to choose from the menu to use what it set up.
Select partititons from the list to modify or delete them. If you have free space it will also show up under a drive, and you can select it to create new partitions. When modifying a partition you will have the opportunity to choose the file system to use, and where to mount it. The partitioning menu also has a choice at the bottom that can be used to automatically partition a drive or existing free space on a drive, if you'd rather go that route. Be sure to create at least two partitions, one for swap and one for the root filesystem (which must be mounted as /). If you forget to mount the root filesystem, partman won't let you continue until you correct this issue.
Capabilities of partman can be extended with installer modules, so if you can't see all promised goodies, check if you have loaded all required modules (e.g. partman-ext3, partman-xfs, or partman-lvm).
After finishing partitioning, select from the menu, and confirm that the filesystems should be created as requested.
During the Base installation, package unpacking and setup messages are redirected to tty4. You can access this terminal by pressing Left Alt-F4; get back to the main installer process with Left Alt-F1.
The unpack/setup messages generated by the base installation are saved in /target/tmp/debootstrap.log when the installation is performed over a serial console.
If there are more suitable kernels in the APT sources, you will be presented a list of these. Select the most suitable one for your system; the selected kernel will be installed on a hard disk and will be used in your new system. (E.g. you may have different requirements for this kernel compared to the installation one).
There is an Execute a Shell item on the menu. If the menu is not available when you need to use the shell, press Left Alt-F2 (on a Mac keyboard, Option-F2) to get to the second virtual console. That's the Alt key on the left-hand side of the space bar, and the F2 function key, at the same time. This is a separate window running a Bourne shell clone called ash.
At this point you are booted from the RAM disk, and there is a limited set of Unix utilities available for your use. You can see what programs are available with the command ls /bin /sbin /usr/bin /usr/sbin. The text editor is nano. The shell has some nice features like autocompletion and history.
Use the menus to perform any task that they are able to do — the shell and commands are only there in case something goes wrong. In particular, you should always use the menus, not the shell, to activate your swap partition, because the menu software can't detect that you've done this from the shell. Press Left Alt-F1 to get back to menus, or type exit if you used a menu item to open the shell.