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Some notes on Debian and Firmware
written April 7, 2022 by TimeTraveler
Category: BlogEntry Tags: Debian; Ubuntu; Firmware; non-free; #43
There are hardware companies that do provide firmware drivers & kernel modules, but because they are not released under a "free" license, the Debian project tags them as non-free (and in fact, they may only be available as compiled binaries, i.e. no source available). So this means after you've installed Debian, you may see some warnings, notices, or errors when starting your system (or in /var/log/messages and /var/log/syslog). To resolve these and get the firmware specific software installed, here are some quick notes on the basic steps.
Note that we covered WiFi specific items previously here: Notes on WiFi Drivers - this also provides some other backgrounds notes and details.
For details on updating the /etc/apt/sources.list, see this item: Debian sources.list notes - be sure all entries match your current distribution, e.g. Stretch, Buster, Bullseye, etc.
Since the Debian releases do not include "non-free" items, and LinuxCollections.com only provides the actual releases from Debian, you will need to do some configuration changes to add these to your system.
If you have a running system, you can add non-free items by making sure non-free is in the /etc/apt/sources.list (e.g. main contrib non-free), then get to the superuser prompt, run "apt update", and use something like:
apt install firmware-misc-nonfree
apt install firmware-realtek
For full list of non-free firmware for Bullseye (links for other releases at top right of page), see:
https://packages.debian.org/source/bullseye/firmware-nonfree
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