“How could any newbie be able to figure this out?” - Me, repeatedly.

8 July 2025

I woke up before sunrise, built a shed floor by hand in record time, survived Tennessee heat, juggled errands, and made it back to my desk by 1:36 PM, still sweaty, with one goal: start my Linux journey.

By 10:00 PM later that night I’d barely gotten a distro downloaded.

Between Linux Guides, BIOS chaos, dual-boot landmines, flashing USB booters, imaging backups and endless acronyms, I’ve realized: Linux isn’t a checklist—it’s a long road trip through Mordor with GRUB as your Gollum.

And this is just the beginning..

***

9 July 2025

The following Day’s humble goal..

Become a high paid DevOps Engineer by noon, it's possible I could have miscalculated...

Reality.

It's 10:42 AM on 9 July 2025, my goal yesterday was to have a Linux distro on my Think Pad T480 by 10PM that night. Might have missed the landing on that one...

I have a shed on the books currently, so in between painting LP panels and sun cooking them for 20 minutes per batch I'm moving forward in the DevOps trenches.

What I need to accomplish is to move forward on learning the basics of a Linux Distro so I can start setting up my home lab and building out a portfolio, getting my CKA cert and networking for my first engineering role. Baby steps..

So far, by this point I'm about 8 minutes into a 6 hour Linux beginner course, and about half way through Debian V.12's installation guide, I've finally got a backed up image of my Think Pads main disk saved, and a copy of Debian setup on USB.

Baby steps..

Robert Cote

Steps I took in installing Debian

I was able to get Debian installed later in the day and in the end it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. I had a lot of help from chat GPT, the guides found below and with a few tools also mentioned below. I now have a functioning linux distro on my T480

• DevOps Roadmap - Kubecraft learning pipeline, introduction to Arch course; to setup your homelab, first basic linux introduction recommendation.

  kubecraft skool group

• Used GPT to narrow down Debian as the best choice to transition from into Arch in the near future. https://www.debian.org/distrib/netinst

• Linux Basic Course: https://youtu.be/sWbUDq4S6Y8

• Read: https://courses.edx.org/asset-v1:LinuxFoundationX+LFS101x+1T2020+type@asset+block@Preparing_Your_Computer_for_Linux_Training.pdf

• Reading above suggested following Distro and Version specific installation guide: Debian V.12 https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/index.en.html

• Suggested Reading: Learning about the GNU Project https://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html {Insert William Wallace Meme with GNU Logo on it's head}

• Used Chat GPT to answer questions I had along the way: Such as, how to get the media (Debian iso image onto a thumb drive)

• GPT Suggested tool: https://etcher.balena.io/#download-etcher (Didn't work on my windows machine.)

• Second suggestion was Rufus and it worked like a charm. https://rufus.ie/en/

  • How to backup my windows 11 disk image before trying to set up dual boot on my Think Pad. https://rescuezilla.com/download

• Verified the ISO image before installing: https://debian.osuosl.org/debian-cdimage/current/amd64/iso-dvd/SHA256SUMS

  •     cd desktop
        shasum -a filename.iso
    
        [for me shasum -a 256 debian-12.11.0-amd64-DVD-1.iso]
    

• Using Chat GPT and Installation Guides above, installed V.12 of Debian. 1. Settled on Xfce for my desktop interface because it is supposedly "light weight" and similar to Arch.

Next Steps: Linux Basics