# Organization of This Document

This document is meant to serve as a manual for first-time &debian; users. It tries to make as few assumptions as possible about your level of expertise. However, we do assume that you have a general understanding of how the hardware in your computer works.

Expert users may also find interesting reference information in this document, including minimum installation sizes, details about the hardware supported by the &debian; installation system, and so on. We encourage expert users to jump around in the document.

In general, this manual is arranged in a linear fashion, walking you through the installation process from start to finish. Here are the steps in installing &debian-gnu;, and the sections of this document which correlate with each step:

1. Determine whether your hardware meets the requirements for using the installation system, in hardware-req.

2. Backup your system, perform any necessary planning and hardware configuration prior to installing &debian;, in preparing. If you are preparing a multi-boot system, you may need to create partitionable space on your hard disk for &debian; to use.

3. In install-methods, you will obtain the necessary installation files for your method of installation.

4. The next boot-installer describes booting into the installation system. This chapter also discusses troubleshooting procedures in case you have problems with this step.

5. Perform the actual installation according to d-i-intro. This involves choosing your language, configuring peripheral driver modules, configuring your network connection, so that remaining installation files can be obtained directly from a &debian; server (if you are not installing from a set of DVD installation images), partitioning your hard drives and installation of a base system, then selection and installation of tasks. (Some background about setting up the partitions for your &debian; system is explained in partitioning.)

6. Boot into your newly installed base system, from boot-new.

Once you've got your system installed, you can read post-install. That chapter explains where to look to find more information about Unix and &debian;, and how to replace your kernel.

Finally, information about this document and how to contribute to it may be found in administrivia.

## Your Documentation Help is Welcome

Any help, suggestions, and especially, patches, are greatly appreciated. Working versions of this document can be found at . There you will find a list of all the different architectures and languages for which this document is available.

Source is also available publicly; look in administrivia for more information concerning how to contribute. We welcome suggestions, comments, patches, and bug reports (use the package `installation-guide` for bugs, but check first to see if the problem is already reported).