You don't need the big swap unless you're planning to hibernate.
You don't need a boot flag for linux with msdos partition table.

For gpt disk with bios boot:

You need a 1MB or greater partition with no filesystem ("unformatted" in gparted, way at the bottom of the list)
and that partition needs a bios_grub flag (EF02 in gdisk). I've been putting this partition at the end.
You'll need at least one linux-formatted partition for the operating system.
You do not need an efi partition and you don't want the esp and boot flags on the linux partition. If you happen to have a real efi partition in addition to the others, it will just sit there and do nothing until you boot in uefi mode.

If you want to dual boot gpt disk with bios, you'll need another linux partition for the second linux installation. If you don't let the second one install a bootloader, you'll need to run update-grub on the first installation to add it to the boot menu. Either linux can be in charge of booting as long as you have a menu entry for the other one. (unless you're a fan of grub command line.)

For uefi boot:

You need a fat32 partition, around 50 - 500MB, with esp and boot flags. (Hint, just check esp in gparted and boot will get checked automatically.) (Hint2: I have 3 installations on one hard drive and the 200MB efi partition has 196MB free.)
You will need at least one partition for the OS, with a linux format and no flag.

If you want to dual boot on a uefi setup, you'll need another linux partition (exactly same advice as above regarding boot menus.)
The difference here is that the you will accumulate bootloaders in the efi partition. A different one for each distribution you install. Run efibootmgr to see the boot order or to make changes. Read the man page and especially read about uefi bootloaders at rodsbooks.com
http://www.rodsbooks.com/efi-bootloaders/index.html

Edit: Ohhh... too many words up above. Read it anyway.

Catprints, please run it with 'refractainstaller -d' and save /var/log/refractainstaller_error.log. Then I can tell exactly where it failed. Thanks.

Siva, no script. I download them manually (possibly with a 'for' loop, depending on how lazy I feel). Some versions did not change between jessie and ascii, some did, and some names changed. (no more firmware-ralink).

Open a terminal, 'su' to get root, then run geany. Or nano. Or whatever you want.
Or use gksu if it's installed. If there's no root account, use gksudo. (or 'sudo -i' for a root terminal)

I never set the root editor in spacefm, but I think it's somewhere around the last tab in preferences.

Well, I tried it, and I didn't run into any problems.

What I did:

installed to real hard drive with desktop-live-lxde iso I made a couple months ago. (task-lxde-desktop was installed)
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get dist-upgade

I automatically got the two new libpolkit packages for consolekit (-backend and -gobject)

I'm using slim here. Did you change your display manager?

I was going to make it 12G, but at the last second I decided to make it 14. Good thing I did, because the install takes up 12.

Here are the rough notes:
- boot parrotsec iso
- get the refractainstaller-base deb and install it
Don't run it yet! I did, and then found out that grub is not installed in the live system. I had to boot the system from grub command line after connecting a virtual drive that had a working bootloader.

This should be easier:
There are grub debs in /lib/live/mount/medium/pool/main/g/grub2/
You need grub2-common, and you'll also need either the grub-pc* or grub-efi-amd64* packages.
You could just install them in the live session, but when it asks about where to put the bootloader, skip that part. Don't put it anywhere yet.

Edit: I'm thinking too hard. If you have a network connection in the live session just install grub-pc. (And still don't let it install the bootloader.)

Then run refractainstaller. You'll get asked where to put the bootloader, and it will get installed.

Reboot into the newly installed system.

Then apt update and install sysvinit-core (I also installed pm-utils because it was recommended. I have recommends turned off.)

Then reboot. (I had to reboot twice because of an error. Didn't write it down, sorry.)

OK, that's as far as I've gotten.

Next step is to change to beowulf repo and upgrade again.

Refractainstaller to the rescue! I installed 9.3.3 -base package without having to add any of the deps. Ran great until I ran out of hard disk space. 6GB is not big enough. du tells me that /usr in the live system is 8.7G. (Not sure how that works, I only allotted 1G ram to this VM.)

I'll have to try again later with a 12G space. Here's a link to the installer deb, so you don't have to mess with changing repos before the install -
https://sourceforge.net/projects/refrac … .3_all.deb

I thought I'd give this a try, so I installed parrot in a virtualbox vm. I can't get the installed system to boot. It hangs somewhere around starting samba. Can't boot to rescue mode, either.

Excellent! Once you figure out all the things not to do, the path will be clear.

If the kernel is a deb package and it's a newer version, it should automatically be set to the default in the boot menu when it's installed. Install newer kernel, reboot, remove older kernel (maybe later, just in case new kernel has bugs). I usually upgrade the kernel last, after the first reboot into the upgraded system.

Wired or wireless? Wired is easy - remove network manager. If that breaks your connection, run dhclient eth0 and install wicd-gtk (and/or wicd-curses if you want to work in console). Wireless wtihout encryption works the same way - just use wlan0 instead of eth0.

You can install spacefm any time. It won't make other file managers go away.

Upgrade in terminal or console is probably better than doing it in synaptic. (I never tried the latter.)

Gnuinos is another one that uses debian-installer, has all free software and uses a libre kernel.

Refracta and Exegnulinux have all free software but use a different installer.

Miyo, have you seen the question about non-free in the ascii installer isos? If so, which iso did you use? Thanks.

Fernando,

I don't know much about the inner workings of the debian-installer, but what little I know confirms that it's an ugly hairball. I agree that the user should be alerted to the fact that their hardware might require non-free firmware, they should be given the choice to install it or not, and the appropriate repositories should be included in sources.list.

That's what I recall happening with the devuan jessie installer isos. I've been testing ascii in virtualbox, so I haven't run into any need for firmware. I'm looking into this.

wdq,

Simple answer: It's all about the user being able to make an informed choice.

Edit: In the hardware installs I've done, I chose eth0 for the network instead of wlan0, and the wireless firmware was not installed. No non-free or contrib packages were installed. (intel quad i7, intel graphics, realtek wireless)