Step 1.) Upgrade to Debian 11 first The process to go to Debian 12 is not as smooth as 11, when trying to upgrade from Debian 10. In fact, it doesn't work directly, so you'll first need to follow this guide to update to Debian 11, reboot and come back here if successful. Step 2.) Update sources.list Update your /etc/apt/sources.list like this: deb http://........

In this example we install debian 10 with --variant=minbase which gives us a minimal/tiny install. Don't use variant if you want the full size install. mkdir /tmp/deb10files debootstrap --variant=minbase buster /tmp/deb10files/ Did you get an error? debootstrap --variant=minbase buster /home/theuser/VMs/deb10files/ You'll get this error if you make a directory in your home........

One simple flag to configure will create a makefile that statically links all the shared objects and embeds them instead the binary execute. This means as long as you have the same architecture that things should run. Eg. if you have an old version of Debian with a different version of glibc, then this will solve that problem. ./configure LDFLAGS="-static" To test that it is really statically linked run ldd: ldd src/wget........

This is not the normal "black screen"issue and I was shocked to eventually find out why. The normal advice of reconfiguring Xorg didn't work. Even booting into "Recovery Mode" did not help. Here is the short end of the stick that fixed it: sudo apt-get install mdm mate-desktop-environment Yes you got it right, mdm and the mate-desktop-environment / gnome were somehow uninstalled. This must be whe........