System requirements

The following requirements apply for both 32bit and 64bit systems:

Depending on the applications and feature set you decide to use (especially if you do not run a graphical desktop), the system may run fine with fewer resources. An installation from the live ISOs uses approximately 2.1G of space on the hard drive.

Installing from a combined live/install ISO image (CD/DVD/USB key)

Before putting BunsenLabs into use, remember that BunsenLabs is a hobby Linux distro released under the GNU GPLv3+ license. This means there is no liability, warranty, or support, or guaranteed updates. If you need those things, choose another distro instead.

Download the ISO image that fits your use case from the link section at the top of the page. Installing from an ISO image booted off of a burnt DVD/CD or USB key is the preferred and fully supported way of installing the BunsenLabs Linux distribution.

• You first download a so-called hybrid ISO image which, depending on size, is suitable for writing to a CD/DVD medium or a USB key drive.
• Then, after booting from the medium, you can choose “Live session” to test the BunsenLabs desktop and Linux compatibility with your hardware, or boot to the Debian installer.

You may find help with burning the file to disk or writing to a USB key in the Debian FAQ section:

• How to write an ISO image under Linux/Unix, Windows or macOS?
• How to write a CD/DVD/BD image to a USB flash drive?

There is a section on the forums which deals with any issues or bugs related to the current release, should you find one.

New users can ask for help in this dedicated section.

Verifying the integrity of your download

It is highly recommended to verify the integrity of any downloaded ISO file. This ensures that the image is not corrupted, and that the image has not been altered.

There are two ways to do this.

Using checksums

If you have downloaded the image from our SSL-secured website, you can quickly verify the integrity of the downloaded ISO file by comparing its SHA-256 checkum to the one published above.

1. Download an ISO file. Do not rename the file.

2. Download the SHA256 checksums file to the same directory as the ISO file.

3. On a Linux system, you can almost always verify the checksums using these commands:

   cd /path/to/the/downloads
       sha256sum -c --ignore-missing release.sha256.txt

4. The output will tell you if the verification succeeded or not.

Using PGP signatures

We use our PGP release key to sign our images. Each downloaded ISO file can be verified using the key and the signature file.

Import the key into your local user’s keyring by executing

gpg --import <(curl -Ls https://ddl.bunsenlabs.org/ddl/bunsen-release.asc)

Verify the signature by downloading both the ISO file and the signature file to the same directory using the links at the top of this page, and invoking GnuPG as follows

gpg --verify SIGNATURE_FILE ISO_FILE

GnuPG should tell you that the file has a ‘good’ signature.

Package-based install

You may also choose to follow our repository set-up instructions and include our package repository into your existing Debian system. This way, you can selectively install packages from the BunsenLabs project and use only a subset of our configurations and assets.

Netinstall script

There is also a netinstall script which you can run after installing a base CLI Debian system. This allows considerably more customization of your install.