Notes on Installing Debian on My Dell Inspiron1010-Mini10 from a USB Boot Stick Made by using a Different Debian Desktop

I use my Dell netbook (Dell Inspiron1010-Mini10) so infrequently, that I find my self reinstalling a fresh OS on it every other time I use it.

[30 Apr 2014] This time I'm keeping notes on my web server, here in this web page.

The following reference are helpful, but does not have all the details that this dummy needs: https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Dell/Inspiron1010-Mini10. So lots more Googling was needed.

1. Make a boot USB stick with the Non-free Broadcom BCM4312 802.11b/g wireless network controller driver. Use a computer with Internet access.
   1. Download the .iso file. I waste too much time finding the correct iso file on a server that has a fast download. Use wget to get the file, it's less painful that using a browser. The file name was debian-testing-i386-xfce-CD-1.iso. Forget about Ubuntu with the Unity desktop, or Debian with Gnome, the Dell mini 10 netbook can't handle them. Unity and/or Gnome3 renders this netbook completely useless. Unity and Gnome3 are resource pigs. The Xfce is a simple desktop environment that is well supported by Debian and installs with a Debian distributed ISO. Xfce is not a resource pig. CrunchBang, is good too, is another distro that is based on Debian, but is not supported by Debian, so I worry that it may suck more of my time. Today I used the URL:

      wget http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/weekly-builds/i386/iso-cd/debian-testing-i386-xfce-CD-1.iso
      

      It took about 2 minutes to wget this ISO file.
   2. And then get the wl debian package (it only took me 2 hours to find, given it was not in non-free where most pages say it is):

      wget http://mirror.anl.gov/pub/debian/pool/main/w/wl/wl_2.15.9+0.20120411-3_all.deb
      

      which just took a few seconds.
   3. Plug in your USB stick.
   4. Find the device file for the USB stich that you just plugged in. You can do that many ways, for example: mount it with a GUI interface and than look for the device file with the df command, and than unmount it. From here out I'll assume that the USB stick device file is /dev/sdc
   5. Run as root:

      dd if=/home/lanceman/Desktop/software/debian-testing-i386-xfce-CD-1.iso of=/dev/sdc
      

   6. Next make another partition to put the wifi driver debian file in. This driver used to be non-free. Run as root:

      fdisk /dev/sdc
      

      Make a new partition of type 6. [p] print should print something like:

      Device    Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
      /dev/sdc1   *          64     1300479      650208   17  Hidden HPFS/NTFS
      /dev/sdc2         1300480    15240575     6970048    6  FAT16
      

      Write the partition and exit with [w].
   7. Mount the new partition, copy the .deb driver file to it and then unmount it (as root):

      mkdosfd /dev/sdc2
      mount /dev/sdc2 /mnt
      cp /home/lanceman/Desktop/software/wl_2.15.9+0.20120411-3_all.deb /mnt
      umount /dev/sdc2
      

2. Now boot your netbook with this USB stick in it. You may need to mess with the netbook BIOS to tell it to boot from USB. It seems to be working.