Xubuntu with a *pure* Debian Base (Part 1)

1. Prepare your build environment.

Basically, decide whether you are going to build this in a virtual machine or on real hardware. I will be building this in VirtualBox. If you are building on real hardware, then make sure that you know what your hardware is in case you need to install any additional drivers along the way eg wireless card, video adapter, processor etc... Your machine will need to be bootable from CD/DVD or USB and you will most likely need to be able to connect to the Internet via Ethernet (at least until you install the WiFi drivers).

You can run VirtualBox in Windows or Linux. For Windows, grab the current installer direct from their website. For Linux, you should be able to install from your distributions repositories.

Depending upon your host system resources, allocate about 16GB for the virtual hard disk, 512MB-1GB RAM and 32MB-64MB video memory. You might want to enable 3D support and PAE if available. I will also be making use of shared folders so you might want to make sure you have the guest additions ISO downloaded if using Linux.

2. Download the netinst ISO

Since the concept here is to recreate the look and feel of Xubuntu, we need to use the same version of the core desktop environment, XFCE. in Xubuntu 14.04, that is XFCE 4.10. This is the current stable release of XFCE, so it came as a surprise to find that the current stable version of Debian (Wheezy) only contains XFCE 4.8, especially as 4.10 has been out for 2 years. As a result, I am going to have to build this system using the testing release of Debian (Jessie), but don't worry, it is actually as stable as most other distros!

Download Debian Jessie Netinst ISO:
https://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/

And choose the Official Netinst release for i386 or amd64 as appropriate to your hardware.

If you are installing on real hardware, then burn the ISO to a CD or transfer it to a USB stick using a toll such as UNetbootin or Rufus (on Windows).

If using VirtualBox, select the ISO as the virtual CD drive source in the settings module.

3. Install Debian

Boot into the netinstall ISO and choose the standard text installer. You can follow most of the defaults, obviously configuring what you need in terms of language and keyboard settings. You will need to make these changes though:

1. For VirtualBox select guided disc partitioning - take over entire disc, root and home on one partition. For real hardware, I'll leave this up to you how you want to proceed.
2. *Deselect Debian Desktop Environment (I am deselecting this so that I can choose the precise components that I want to)
3. *Select Print Server, Laptop and System Utilities
4. Create a root and regular user account.
5. At the login prompt, type your root and your root password.
6. Then type poweroff to shutdown.
7. Optionally, take a VirtualBox snapshot so you can go back to this point if things go pear-shaped later.

This will take up 1.2GB of hard disk space (taken from du -h / command) and uses about 28MB of RAM (taken from free -m command) whilst idling at the command prompt.

From now on I will list disk usage for each step along with optional extras so you can decide how 'fat' or 'lean' to create your system. Please note, these are usage estimations reported by apt prior to installation and are given here in the order that the packages are installed. They may vary on your system, especially if you install a lot of packages that share dependencies (eg a lot of Gnome applications appear to take up a lot of space but share a large number of libraries so altogether may not be such a large install).

4. Setup Display Server (Xorg) and Audio (PulseAudio)

Installing Xorg should be fairly painless, but you may need some proprietary drivers for best results. If you just install the full Xorg package, you will have most of the open source drivers needed to get X working. More information on proprietary drivers can be found here.

According to the Debian notes on pulseaudio, you only need to install the package and it should just work. However, you may need a bit more tweaking than that.

Remember to run these commands as root unless otherwise specified!

1. Reboot machine and log in as root at the login prompt.
2. apt-get update
3. apt-get upgrade = 519KB as of 10 June 2014
4. apt-get install --no-install-recommends xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-video-fbdev xserver-xorg-video-vesa (xserver-xorg-video-[yourcard, can be intel, nouveau, or ati]) = 8,672KB for a minimal set of packages
   optional:
   apt-get install xorg (for the full X package) = 41.5MB 
5. apt-get install alsa = 3,653KB
6. alsactl init
7. apt-get install pulseaudio = 37.6MB
   optional:
   pavucontrol paman pasystray = 102MB
8. logout and login as user:pulseaudio -Daplay /usr/share/sounds/alsa/* orspeaker-test
9. Check you can hear something!
10. optional to test your xorg configuration:
    apt-get install blackbox = 772KB (only installs 2 packages which will give you a rudimentary desktop - blackbox and libbt0)
    startx
11. poweroff and take vm snapshot.

5. Install XFCE base system and Display/Login Manager

1. apt-get install xfce4 = 184MB
2. apt-get install lightdm lightdm-gtk-greeter = 28.7MB
3. dpkg-reconfigure lightdm
4. shutdown -r now
5. Reboot and you will see a basic lightdm login screen. You will need to type your username and password (for now).
6. Use the default XFCE panel configuration (for now).
7. Shutdown using the XFCE menu (you can decide whether to save your sessions or not)
8. Take vm snapshot.

Now that we have X and a basic desktop setup, du reports disk usage is up to 1.8GB and free reports we are using 168MB of RAM whilst logged into the XFCE desktop with no applications running.

Click on to Part 2 to configure XFCE...