So just a quick post as I am currently installing an AMD RX6600 graphics card to my “gaming” machine.
Recent kernels have included improvements for AMD CPU’s and GPU’s, Debian stable does not include the latest kernel however in Debian backports you can get a newer Debian safe kernel without adding any non-Debian repository.
Debian backports is an optional source of newer packages it is not recommended to update everything to their backports versions, but to only use the packages you need
With my new GPU being RDNA2 based, it makes it an ideal candidate for trying the newer kernel (as it the time of this post it is version 6.11.5 in backports)
As I would like my Kernel to continue to receive version updates from backports I will be installing the backports version of linux-image-amd64 which is a meta package
To install any software from Debian’s bookworm backports you first need to add the backports to your system sources.
Before we start get your system up to date
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade
To do this you will need to add a backports.list file to /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ use your favourite editor to do this, I use nano.
sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list.d/backports.list
then add the following lines
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm-backports main contrib non-free-firmware
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm-backports main contrib non-free-firmware
Once these are added, save
Then update your sources with
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade
Now you can select to install packages from back ports by including -t bookworm-backports in the command.
To install the latest kernel I used
sudo apt install -t bookworm-backports linux-image-amd64
Once completed simply reboot to start using the newer kernel.
Hey Jase, condole… congratulations on your new AMD gpu.
Never used backports before but I will and when i do I will definitely need this post.
Good job (for an AMD user…)