Quick notes to installing Debian 12 as a VM in Parallels.

I used the debian-testing-arm64-netinst.iso found here.

I selected a Gnome desktop and not much else (one other thing that I think was preselected).

Babsity the lengthy install, it asks a lot of questions throughout.

Installing Parallels Tools

This was the trickiest part. The VM window toolbar has an exclamation point icon that then leads you to installing the Tools. But it doesn’t work, and gives you bad instructions. Similarly, everything I found online gave me commands that didn’t work.1

So I mounted the Parallels Tools installer image manually:

Mount CD ROM Image Setting

The .iso is buried inside the Parallels.app bundle:

Path to .iso

If you’re lucky (I wasn’t), the contents of this CD will appear inside the VM at /media/cdrom. But I had to get the system to mount it:

$ sudo mount -ro exec,remount /dev/cdrom /media/cdrom

After this, the contents are visible, and you can run the installer:

$ ls /media/cdrom0/
boot/  boot.catalog  css/  debian@  dists/  doc/  EFI/	firmware/  install/  install.a64/  md5sum.txt  pics/  pool/  README.html  README.mirrors.html  README.mirrors.txt  README.txt
$ sudo /media/cdrom0/install

Then follow the on-screen prompts, and when it’s done, reboot.

  1. Most of this I got from this page. The mount command shown there, however, doesn’t work. ↩