My Intel NUC (Next Unit of Computing) mini-PC arrived today. Installing the RAM and M.2 card was super-simple. Then I tried to install Debian.
First I used unetbootin to create a Testing (Buster) netinstall USB drive. First of all, it's hard to get it to boot from a USB drive. You have to get into the BIOS, which on this device by default is not prompted when you power it up. You have to use Intel's secret handshake: turn off the NUC, then hold the power button down for three (but not four!) seconds, which gets you their special power-button menu, where you can turn on the BIOS prompt (and also change the BIOS directly from that menu). You also have to turn on legacy boot, of course, to boot from the USB drive. ... and when the installer got to installing kernel modules, it could not do that because the kernel version on the downloadable image doesn't match the version in the repository. I'm assuming this is a transient thing with this particular weekly image. So I downloaded the DVD image, and used unetbootin to put that on the USB key. Now the installer failed with the message that it could not mount the install CD ... which was imaged onto the same USB drive I had just booted from, so ... something weird there. I flashed the Intel BIOS to the latest version. This had no effect I could see. Finally, rather than try to figure out the installer issue, I dug out my DVD burner (not used for over a year), burned an actual DVD image and plugged the USB optical drive into the NUC, which detected it, and the install then ran smoothly. Aside from HDMI audio not working, I mean, and restarting PulseAudio fixed that. Before anyone asks: yes, I'm going to submit this through reportbug. I wanted this here as well, at least partly to help anyone experiencing the same problems (since this mailing list is more likely to turn up in web searches than Debian bug reports). -- Carl Fink c...@finknetwork.com Thinking and logic and stuff at Reasonably Literate http://reasonablyliterate.com