I am new to the forum here. I am hoping to get some advice/assistance regarding my computer's graphics card and X; I have been unable to successfully use drivers for my computer's graphics card without causing the OS to hang at startup. I have been using Linux lightly for a few years, so I can do basic system maintenance, but I am not very familiar with the inner workings and thus may have missed something obvious. I will detail my problem below.
My computer is the basic model of the 2013 Mac Pro (Mac Pro 6,1, aka "Trashcan Mac"). This Mac is advertised with dual AMD FirePro D300 graphics processors. The 'lspci' command shows these as two "Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Curacao XT / Trinidad XT [Radeon R7 370 / R9 270X/370X]" entries. My current setup includes three 1080i monitors, each connected via DisplayPort (this Mac has six Thunderbolt/DisplayPort ports). I am currently running a fresh installation of Debian 9; 'uname -a' shows "Linux debian 4.9.0-5-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 4.9.65-3+deb9u2 (2018-01-04) x86_64 GNU/Linux". I'm using the default Debian desktop environment and did not initially install any extra packages or do anything unusual. The computer boots using EFI into GRUB and then launches Debian. I did eventually install the 'firmware-linux-nonfree' package; see below.
This install is my first attempt at installing Debian directly on my computer's hardware; I had used Debian before on MacOS via VirtualBox, and I now am trying to reverse the process by using Debian as the host with MacOS as a KVM guest. I am currently having difficulty getting my computer's graphics capabilities to function properly and recognize all three of my monitors. The default installation only recognizes a single monitor; 'xrandr' produces the following:
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> xrandr: Failed to get size of gamma for output default
> Screen 0: minimum 1920 x 1080, current 1920 x 1080, maximum 1920 x 1080
> default connected primary 1920x1080+0+0 0mm x 0mm
> 1920x1080 77.00*
As I mentioned, my previous experience with Linux puts me somewhere between a beginner and intermediate skill level user, and I am hoping to find a solution that is within my current grasp of Linux and thus doesn't appear to be magical. To that end, I would like (if possible of course), to use only packages listed in the Debian repositories (including the contrib/non-free ones), and I would like to make only minor changes to system configuration files that are within my understanding. I prefer to avoid major system configuration changes/customizations and definitely avoid complex scripts. If the only solution lies in one of these realms, I would appreciate pointers to documentation that would help me understand what is going within a reasonable time frame. I am also willing to consider, as a last resort, switching to the unstable 'sid' release, or the old Debian 8 'Jessie' release (no idea where to find that) if one of those can help me; I know that there is an 'fglrx' package that might be effective in the older releases. I would also consider changing the boot to use CSM/BIOS instead of EFI, but I have no idea how to do that. Thank you for reading through this post, and I greatly appreciate in advance any help that you can provide. I will do my best to provide any other system information that would be helpful in finding a solution. This page has provided me with most of the information I described above, and I can point to other resources I've used as well if requested: https://wiki.debian.org/AtiHowTo