I don’t have spare peripherals like a monitor and a keyboard. How do you suggest I do a bare-metal install of Debian on a computer (meant to be a server)?
All I have is a laptop. I’m getting these machines for free from a friend
I picked up a second hand monitor from a goodwill shop for like $7USD. It would be worth having a display of some sort for troubleshooting.
Yeah at those price points it isn’t worth it at all to attempt a headless install.
You’re going to want a monitor and keyboard anyway. It’s going to be pretty hard to troubleshoot a boot issue in the future without them.
yep, a tiny boot error and suddenly you need to punch commands into initramfs. good luck with that headlessly.
Well I see your problem, but you’re going to have a bad time without a screen. Maybe you can get something second hand / cheap or even ask a friend to borrow one for a few days?
Take out the hard drive out of your laptop and put the drive for the server in it, install Debian using the built in monitor and keyboard of your laptop.
