Advice on installing BunsenLabs desktop on a homelab Proxmox server?

null-directory · 2023-10-02 17:07:32

Years ago I regularly used #! and loved it. But I haven't gotten back around to building a home workstation until recently. It's a machine that will mostly run VMs and containers, but I wanted to have a nice desktop gui while using it directly; it's a server, but it's also a hobby toy and I want to enjoy using it. (Headless terminals are a joy too, but sometimes it's nice to have shiney graphics.)

My current plan is to install Proxmox and then add Boron via netinstall after. Would a netinstall be the best way to add the desktop environment to a headless system? The Boron branch on GitHub seems to be what I should use for Debian 12 Bookworm.

The goal is that it's a host server first. I'll install onto ZFS so I can rollback any major screwups that inevitably will come down the road. So experimentation is reasonably safe and there should be enough drives to ship snapshots off for cold storage I'm hoping it'll even be safe to experiment with the Boron beta.

It's been a long, long time since I've regularly used a proper Debian environment (having mostly used RHEL and Ubuntu servers at work). Any pitfalls I should expect in terms of clashing dependencies or package repos by adding Boron after a system is already installed?

johnraff · 2023-10-03 01:52:53

null-directory wrote:

Any pitfalls I should expect in terms of clashing dependencies or package repos by adding Boron after a system is already installed?

If you install a basic CLI Debian Bookworm, then adding the BunsenLabs Boron repository to your apt sources and installing either bunsen-meta-all or bunsen-meta-lite should (is expected to) bring in a BunsenLabs setup with no problems. Boron is essentially Debian Bookworm with some configs on top, so there should be no clashes. If you don't want the full BL stack then you can cherry-pick individual packages. This post is a bit old now, but might help: https://forums.bunsenlabs.org/viewtopic … 08#p126008

Two things about the initial Debian install:
- when setting up your user account, our general advice is not to enter a root password so that you will be given sudo privileges. Some people setting up a remote server might want a root account, so decide this one for yourself.
- towards the end of debian-installer's process when selecting software, uncheck all the desktop options leaving only "standard system utilities".

null-directory · 2023-10-08 20:03:23

Thanks. I tried the netinstall but it kept clobbering the /etc/apt/sources.list and removing the non-free and non-free-firmware entries, leading to a bunch of errors like "E: Package 'firmware-iwlwifi' has no installation candidate"

I'll follow up on the netinstall git repo once I figure out a patch.

EDIT: And there may be a bigger problem, as this shows up in the install package listing, which is a weird problem with Proxmox, if only because I'm on version 8, not 6...

The following packages will be REMOVED:
  chrony fuse proxmox-default-kernel proxmox-kernel-6.2 proxmox-ve
  pve-firmware pve-kernel-6.2

Last edited by null-directory (2023-10-08 20:20:20)

johnraff · 2023-10-09 04:36:28

It looks as if Proxmox uses non-standard packages and kernel, so there will be clashes with a normal Debian system. If you want to continue using Proxmox I would suggest you install only the BunsenLabs packages you need rather than the full metapackage. That would make conflicts less likely, though take longer to do.

#1 2023-10-02 17:07:32

Advice on installing BunsenLabs desktop on a homelab Proxmox server?

#2 2023-10-03 01:52:53

Re: Advice on installing BunsenLabs desktop on a homelab Proxmox server?

#3 2023-10-08 20:03:23

Re: Advice on installing BunsenLabs desktop on a homelab Proxmox server?

#4 2023-10-09 04:36:28

Re: Advice on installing BunsenLabs desktop on a homelab Proxmox server?

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