Install Proxmox VE on Debian 12

• Debian 12 installation
• Static IP address

The Debian installer performs the network configuration by default using IPv6 autoconfiguration and DHCP, if available. To force a manual network configuration in the UEFI installer, press E and execute the following command

netcfg/disable_autoconfig=true 

Select the Help entry for the BIOS installation program and start the installation by entering the command:

 installgui etcfg/disable_autoconfig=true.

Further details can be found in the documentation of the Debian installer.

It is recommended to install only the package selection “Standard System Utilities” and “SSH Server”, as Proxmox VE comes with its own packages for QEMU and LXC. A desktop environment is not necessary.

Add /etc/hosts entry for your IP address.

The host name of your computer must be resolvable via /etc/hosts.

This means that you need one of the following entries for your host name in /etc/hosts:

• 1 IPv4 or
• 1 IPv6 or
• 1 IPv4 and 1 IPv6

Note: This also means that the address 127.0.1.1, which may be present by default, must be removed.

For example, if your IP address is 192.168.15.77 and the hostname is prox4m1, then your /etc/hosts file could look like this:

127.0.0.1 localhost

192.168.15.77 prox4m1.proxmox.com prox4m1

The following lines are desirable for IPv6-capable hosts

localhost ip6-localhost ip6-loopback

ff02::1 ip6-allnodes

ff02::2 ip6-allrouters

You can use the hostname command to test whether your setup is OK:

hostname --ip-address

192.168.15.77 # your IP should be here

1. Adapt your sources.list to
   Add the Proxmox VE repository:

echo „deb [arch=amd64] http://download.proxmox.com/debian/pve bookworm pve-no-subscription“ > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pve-install-repo.list

2. Add the Proxmox VE repository key as root (or use sudo):

wget https://enterprise.proxmox.com/debian/proxmox-release-bookworm.gpg -O /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/proxmox-release-bookworm.gpg

3. Now check the setting

sha512sum /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/proxmox-release-bookworm.gpg 7da6fe34168adc6e479327ba517796d4702fa2f8b4f0a9833f5ea6e6b48f6507a6da403a274fe201595edc86a84463d50383d07f64bdde2e3658108db7d6dc87 /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/proxmox-release-bookworm.gpg

4. Update your repository and the system by executing the following:

apt update && apt full-upgrade

5. Install the Proxmox VE kernel
   First you need to install and boot the Proxmox VE kernel, as some packages depend on certain kernel compile flags being set or function extensions (e.g. for Apparmor) being available.

apt install proxmox-default-kernel

6. Restart systemctl

7. Install the Proxmox VE packages

apt install proxmox-ve postfix open-iscsi chrony

Note that you can replace chrony with any other NTP daemon, but we do not recommend using systemd-timesyncd on server systems, and the ntpsec-ntpdate option may conflict with booting the network on some hardware. Configure the packages that require user input during installation according to your needs.
If you have a mail server on your network, you should configure Postfix as a satellite system. Your existing mail server will then be the relay host that forwards the emails sent by Proxmox VE to the final recipient.
If you do not know what to enter here, select local only and leave the system name unchanged.

8. Remove the Debian kernel
   Proxmox VE ships its own kernel and keeping the default Debian kernel can lead to problems during upgrades, for example with Debian point releases. You must therefore remove the standard Debian kernel:

apt remove linux-image-amd64 'linux-image-6.1*'

9. Update and check the grub2 configuration by executing

update-grub

10. Recommended: Remove the os-prober package
    The os-prober package scans all partitions on your computer to create dual-boot GRUB entries. The scanned partitions can also include partitions that are assigned to virtual machines that you do not want to add as a boot entry.
    
    If you have not installed Proxmox VE as a dual boot alongside another operating system, you can safely remove the os-prober package:

apt remove os-prober