Notes of Dual Boot Debian 11 and Windows 11

August 30, 2022

Download ISO

The first thing you need to do is download Debian image file, which can be found here, Downloading Debian CD/DVD images via HTTP/FTP.

Create Bootable USB Driver

BURN Tools: to create bootable USB drivers.
Live USB Driver: supports live driver, which means it can set persistence partition.
  1. Rufus (Support Live USB Driver)
  2. balenaEtcher
  3. UNetbootin (Support Live USB Driver)

Free a Patition or Disk

In Windows11, right click the windows menu, and select disk management. and then refer to Overview of Disk Management | Microsoft Docs
You will need this space to store Debian OS and mounting file system.

Change Bios Settings

After burning the Debian image, you should go to the bios settings (looking for help from your vendor website) to set the priority of the computer boot item and make sure the USB driver is in the top order.

Finsh Setup Guide

Just follow the setup guide to finish the installation process. Be careful to mount the file system on disk or partition right, otherwise, you will never get those data back.

Setting Mirror Site

Just edit /etc/apt/sources.list file, you'd better backup it first.
refer to Debian Tsinghua Open Source Mirror

Set Environment Variables

Just edit ~/.bashrc or ~/zshrc and append the following commands.
For Example, add JDK to PATH.
export JAVA_HOME="path/to/yourJDK"
export PATH="PATH:$JAVA_HOME/bin/"bash

Questions & Answers

1 failed to load firmware rtl...(-2).
TIP
This question occurred while I using the Rufus to burn the image, it was disappeared when I used balenaEtcher.
more references:
2 failed to detect external monitor.
TIP
This is because the dual graphics card is not properly driven, there are two solutions.
  • only use the discrete graphics card in bios settings if your computer vendor supports it.
  • refer to NVIDIA Optimus
more references:
3 Restart failed after installing nvidia-driver package.
TIP
This can be solved by entering recovery mode (advance boot Debian with recovery mode).
first, you need to enable the network, you can check your network interface name by ip link, and up the interface by ip link set eno1 up, note modify the eno1 to yourself interface name that checked before this step. finally, use dhclient eno1 to get ip address so that make network works.
the next thing you should do is run apt purge nvidia-* and apt install linux-headers-amd64 nvidia-driver firmware-misc-nonfree, these two commands can help you reinstall the nvidia driver.
The End