[mxclelaz] Debian Wheezy on a laptop

Installed Debian Wheezy amd64 on a laptop.  Gnome 3 Desktop Environment.  So far, so good; essential hardware works: suspend (standby), Ethernet, WiFi.

Used mini.iso on a USB stick with the automatically created second partition for firmware as described in the Installation documentation.  It requires a heart stopping leap of faith to be sure you've picked the right drive to cp the image to.  Manually download (not apt-get) the required firmware package (which the installer will tell you), dpkg-deb -x to extract it.

No fancy partitioning or dual booting.

Installer tried to write GRUB to the wrong drive, namely the USB installer stick.  Worked after going back and manually specifying the target drive.  (Switched to a different console, opened a shell, examined where /target was mounted to figure out the right drive.)

Rebooted into system.  Added non-free to apt.sources and installed the firmware packages via apt-get.  It's kind of confusing how the installer installs a kernel with the right firmware (gathered from the second partition of the USB stick), so it works at first, but will probably fail whenever there is a kernel upgrade.

Does not have Ubuntu's option to encrypt home directories.