You may have heard of the (sad) news regarding Redhat Close sourcing its code recently, which made a lot of folks angry to say the least. RHEL-based distributions like AlmaLinux or RockyLinux also suffering from this decision, although they’re confident they can sustain their distribution.

This makes debian bookworm subject more relevant than ever. In this context, i will provide you with a simple quickstart (Installation, Packages, docker-ready solution) to be able to use debian 12 as a docker-ready server.

To be more precise, my methos relies on two configurations that i think can facilitate a lot of things for us :

1. Preseed configuration
2. casaOS installation (for docker with a nice UI)

Here is my debian-12-preseed-casaos repo.

For this to work, you’ll need to :

1. Download minimal debian 12 ISO from official debian sources

Simple instructions:

1. Edit preseed.cfg and change PUT_YOUR_IP_HERE into your local ip address (where you’ve cloned this repo)
2. Boot your VM/Hardware with the iso
3. Go to Advanced Options > Automated Install
4. input the location of your preseed.cfg.

In my case i like to fire a quick python -m http.server 7777 from the active directory where the preseed.cfg is available. Then point to http://mylocalip:7777/preseed.cfg

5. Take a cup of tea and wait for the installation to finish.

Once finished you can access casaOS using http://mylocalip.

N.B :

The preseed.cfg does a lot of things for you, definitely go check it and customize it to your heart’s content.

I hope this little tutorial helps you use debian as your main server.