I recently purchased a home server (Lenovo ThinkServer TS140 with Intel Xeon E3-1225). My goal with this purchase is to learn a little bit more about Linux, play around with Xen a bit, and eventually create a home-base for all my media and files.

I’ve been documenting every single step of the process in my personal wiki, but I want to take select pieces from that and turn them into mini tutorials. This is one of those pieces.

The sources.list file

Linux is designed to be installed from a CD-ROM, which feels so old-school to me. I haven’t owned a CD or DVD player or burner in years — none of my laptops have them, I have no gaming systems, and I stream all my media to an Amazon Fire TV running Kodi. So installing Linux from a CD just felt wrong.

I chose to work with Debian, specifically because that’s one of the Linux flavors we use at work. I downloaded the ISO (or CD image file) from the official website, “burned” it onto a USB stick, and installed.

However, when I tried to use the apt-get command to install some software, specifically lvm2, I got this error:

Media change: please insert the disc labeled
 'Debian GNU/Linux 8.2.0 _Jessie_ - Official i386 CD Binary-1 20150906-10:02'
 in the drive '/media/cdrom/' and press enter

Even though I installed Debian from a USB stick, it was still looking for a CD in the CD drive. I needed some way to tell the system to look somewhere else. Continue reading →