AMD graphics card support in Debian

[fox]

Those of you with an AMD Radeon GPU may have had trouble getting it to work properly. I certainly have on my 5k iMac with a Radeon R9 M390 GPU, and have reported this elsewhere. One of the distros I tried on it was Debian via a live USB, and it required 5 minutes to boot up because of a graphics card problem. Well apparently the issue is missing packages that keep the open source AMDGPU driver from installing. If you are having any issues with a recent AMD graphics card on a Debian-based distro, the following article might be helpful (get it here). The missing packages are firmware-linux, llvm and clang and to get them with apt or synaptic, you need to have contrib and non-free repositories enabled.

[Jason]

Thanks for this tip, Fox. I'm sure other people will benefit from it. How come you're trying Debian, btw? Were you thinking it might work better with your iMac?

Also looks like I may soon be wrong about AMD cards being difficult to configure under Linux. That's great to see!

[fox]

.... How come you're trying Debian, btw? Were you thinking it might work better with your iMac?
....

It was one of the distros that Bob recommended that I try to see if the live version would load quickly on my 5k iMac.

[fox]

I should point out that other distros will have different needs for support files to get the AMDGPU open source driver running. openSUSE needs a different file installed before that driver will work, but when I installed that file, the driver loaded. Best to check the distro help site for the specific file(s) needed.