Following up on Replacing an old HP computer for $35: Debian 13 is now out, so I deleted the Debian 12 installation on that machine and replaced it with a fresh installation of the new version. The first thing I did was download debian-13.0.0-amd64-netinst.iso and put it on a USB stick with Rufus. Installing from this failed, with a message that some obscure file was corrupt. I don’t know if this was a file on the iso or one that had been downloaded in the installation process. A second attempt also failed.

The next step was to download the much larger file debian-13.0.0-amd64-DVD-1.iso. Copying it to a USB stick with Rufus failed, so I tried again with Balena Etcher. This worked and I was able to successfully install Debian 13 with it. I used manual partitioning since I did not want to disturb the Linux Mint 21 and Ubuntu 25.04 installations already present.

Most of my configuration steps worked perfectly. The exception was the installation of Microsoft fonts, which failed with the error “add-apt-repository: command not found”. A quick look at Google led me to How to Fix ‘add-apt-repository command not found’ on Ubuntu & Debian. This suggested running sudo apt-get install software-properties-common. This failed with the message Unable to locate package software-properties-common. Later I found debian:testing (trixie) has removed software-properties-common dpkg required by llvm.sh #120608. Looks like I will have to find another way to install the Microsoft fonts.

Looking back at Replacing an old HP computer for $35, I have used both Rufus and Balena Etcher to create USB sticks. Neither works all the time, so it is nice to have choices. I will look into other tools to do this as well.