| As a long time non-contributing Debian/Ubuntu user (I hop between the two whenever one of them annoys me too much), I've had a lot of issues locating and using non-free firmware when required. For the longest time (since fixed), trying to use Wi-Fi in debian-installer simply didn't work, regardless whether I used the unofficial image or dumped the firmware debs on disk. Can't complain about that anymore since it's fixed. Now that Wi-Fi works when available at install-time, let's try to install a bog standard desktop system. Did you run the text installer or the graphical installer? If you used the text installer, you might be surprised to get an unescapable gray screen on an otherwise fully working booted system! Your video out doesn't work properly because kernel modesetting doesn't work without firmware or some mumbo jumbo like that. Your options are: - Run the graphical installer in the first place so that the GPU firmware is used/installed by the installer - Run a shell in the text installer and do "apt-install firmware-blah", a command which is only documented in a dusty unstyled html in a file cabinet hidden by a beware of leopard sign copyrighted 2010 - On boot up, use some relatively arcane GRUB magic (I'm just a user, so I have to look it up every time, okay?) to boot into some kind of safe non-graphical mode and install the GPU firmware (Bonus: the unofficial firmware-included disc image symlinks the firmware debs, so the image only works when you DD it. The most popular Windows disc writing software Rufus recommends writing disc images in ISO mode (file-by-file) so that you can use excess free space. If you're wondering why the firmware directory has a bunch of 0 byte files, that's why, and you need to switch to DD mode.) |