You do have the option of installing Debian with Raspberry Pi Desktop, and that’s available for download on the Raspberry site - and they do call it “Raspberry Pi Desktop (for PC and Mac)”, but it is Debian with the Raspberry PI desktop packages.
Anyone trying to boot an Intel x86 machine (modern laptop / desktop ) using a Raspbian PI image on a USB drive will fail.
As you correctly point out - this doesn’t appear to be the issue in this case
Raspberry Pi Desktop (for PC and Mac)” has the main advantage over vanila Debian that it emulates armhf architecture and can install and run packages for armhf. Below is an example of installation of fr24feed’s package for RPi (armhf) on x64 x86 i386 i686, which succeeded only on “Raspbian for PC & Mac”, and failed on “Ubuntu 18.04” & “Debian 9.9” (Click here for full details)
# Add architecture armhf to use RPi armhf package on i386 / i686 / x86_64 PC:
sudo dpkg --add-architecture armhf
sudo apt update
# Install dependencies
sudo apt install gcc-6-base:armhf libc6:armhf libgcc1:armhf libstdc++6:armhf
# Download fr24feed armhf.deb package and install it on i386 / x86_64 PC
wget -O fr24feed_1.0.23-8_armhf.deb http://repo-feed.flightradar24.com/rpi_binaries/fr24feed_1.0.23-8_armhf.deb
sudo dpkg -i fr24feed_1.0.23-8_armhf.deb
# Signup and configure receiver
sudo fr24feed --signup
sudo systemctl restart fr24feed
fr24feed-status
I have tried a DVD burnt as a iso I made, A flashdrive and micro SD to load up the OS and all stop with the same screen. I am using the Raspberry Pi desktop image for this.
Normally the hard drive will be sda and the cdrom or the USB stick should be sdb.
Might also be sdc
Most likely the USB stick will be at sdb, that means the first partition on that device will be /dev/sdb1
So you mount that partition as /cdrom, that’s where the installer wants the install sources.
mount /dev/sdb1 /cdrom
If that is too confusing, read up on the linux file hierarchy and what mounting means
Anyway if you succeed in mounting, use Alt-F1 or Alt-F7 (just try both) to get back to the graphical installer.
Retry the cd-rom detection and it should now find the installer.
If that doesn’t work you might have to go into the bios and check if you can change the boot mode into UEFI only.
Maybe you can find some instructions for the BIOS of your laptop model.
If it’s doing qemu userspace emulation, be aware that this is very slow; not a big issue for things like the feeder software itself, but for anything CPU-hungry like dump1090 it’d be a problem.
For dump1090 (FA or Mutability), this is not a problem, as source codes are available for both, and package can be compiled right on the user machine. This eliminates the need to use armhf packages. The problem is mainly with feeder softwares. These (except piaware) are closed-source and cannot be compiled on user machine.