[Solved] Adding a Driver from Testing

[Barujin]

My Radeon card is newer than the Stable driver, so I need the Testing version. Is it possible to add that driver to the installer for Stable when I install Debian to hardware? So far, I've been using Stable in vmWare in Windows. When installing Windows, this has been easy. Since Linux uses repositories, I'm confused. I just tried installing Testing to vmWare, but the installer wouldn't boot up. Thanks.

[torque_wrench]

Hello Barujin,

i´m in the same boat with my AMD Radeon-Card - there are three possible ways:

The first one: you use the weekly builded ISOs: https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/weekly-builds/

The second one(my preferred way): Install from the stable ISO and upgrade the to testing
How to: https://wiki.debian.org/DebianTesting

The third one: Install from the stable ISO and enable "backports" in your repo, the backport-repo contains some (not all) backported packages from "testing"
How to: https://backports.debian.org/

Here the current Versions of "amdgpu" and "firmware-amd"
https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=amdgpu
https://packages.debian.org/search?suit ... rmware-amd

[mrmazda]

You may block the installer from using the non-working Bookworm version by applying nomodeset or amdgpu.modeset=0 to the installer's cmdline options. Once installation is complete, you can block it again on first boot to facilitate getting some supportive version installed, e.g., a backport version.

[Barujin]

Maybe backports will work. Thanks. That's a lot of great information.

[Barujin]

I found a distro of Debian called Sparky. It offers a Testing version. I installed it to vmWare and tried it for a bit. It worked and was nice, after some customizing. I'll use it for a while to see if it breaks.

EDIT: After digging into it, I've realized that Sparky's repos include Debian Testing. I don't see how it's any safer to use than the real Testing. Interesting.