Since I have been thoroughly disappointed with the stability of Arch Linux on my
iMac recently, I decided to get my ass back over to Debian.
What caught me off guard when I finished the install and rebooted was an error
that I had never seen before:
Radeon kernel modesetting for r600 or later requires firmware-amd-graphics
Everything had come to a standstill so I went ahead and tried to swap virtual
terminals.
Swapping worked but the screen started to blink showing the original error /
kernel panic and all of that. I wasn’t able to log in at all.
Next up I rebooted the system and booted into recovery mode.
After a minute of figuring out how to get my networking up and running again, I
updated with apt-get update and then tried to install the aforementioned
package, firmware-amd-graphics.
NO DICE!
Package wasn’t available. As it turns out, on Debian, this package is a non-free
package. Makes sense considering it’s for an AMD graphics card on an Apple
machine.
To gain access to the package, I edited /etc/apt/sources.list and made sure
that non-free was enabled for my primary repository. Make sure your entries
look something like this:
deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ testing main non-free contrib
deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ testing main non-free contrib
Once that was good to go, I just ran:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install firmware-amd-graphics
Once that was done installing, I rebooted and everything was working as
expected!
