Installing LMDE 5 on an existing Multi-Partition System

[Len E]

I’ve used Ubuntu-based Mint distros for years on my old BIOS-based PC’s among other
co-resident distributions. With Ubuntu, with release 22.04, now making BIOS-based
operation impractical, I’m looking to LMDE as a Mint alternative.

I’m concerned that because LMDE only comes with the Cinnamon desktop environment,
that it would be “too heavy” for my low-powered equipment.

Also, the LMDE 5 release notes warn that LMDE 5 won’t install properly on multi-boot
platforms.

I believe I’ve found an answer to the dilemma.
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In the Linux Mint Deutsch repositories on Source Forge, there are some unofficial lxde-based
versions of LMDE.
I downloaded inoffizielles-lmde-5-lxde-32bit-de-20220403-1849.iso and burned it to a DVD.
On initial boot-up of the DVD, given my minuscule command of the German language, I
guessed that the first command in the list presented was the appropriate one, and it did start
up the live-cd process.
I wanted to enable the English language at the first opportunity, and the default keyboard
presented a problem: the / character was not in the usual place. After some trial-and-error,
I found that the / character was actually where the & is, as an upper-case 7 .

I was then able to cd /etc/default, sudo mousepad locale, and change the setting from
LANG=de_DE.UTF-8 to LANG=en_CA.UTF-8 .
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Given that the Mint live-installer was/is not a suitable choice, from synaptic, I installed
calamares and calamares-settings-debian, a total of 135 packages. Not understanding the
menu structure at all well at this point, I went to “all applications”, and found both
mint install and debian install. I selected debian install and to my delight, the
calmares installer appeared in English ! The partition selection (root, /boot, swap) and
where to install the bootloader were all achieved without incident, and the installation
was successful and functions normally on the test PC in its designated partitions.
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Len E.