Several problems installing Debian on Lenovo IdeaPad 5 (AMD Ryzen 5 and AMD Radeon)

Question

I've recently bought a Lenovo IdeaPad 5 14ABA7 (Type 82SE) with a AMD Ryzen 5 5625U processor and Integrated AMD Radeon Graphics. The laptop comes without any OS and I installed Debian 11 on it (current kernel: 5.10.0-19-amd64). Unfortunately there is no specific documentation for this hardware.

The installation seemed to have been successfully with the exception of the WiFi adapter that was not working out of the box. Luckily I managed to solve the problem following this thread.

Unfortunately, I soon realised that there are a number of things that do not work:

1. Suspension: if I push the suspend button, the system remain turned on (cursor on a black screen)
2. Screen brightness: it seems the screen is always at its maximum brightness and cannot be adjusted (if a push the increase/decrease buttons the brightness does not change).
3. Animation: I cannot see any animation. I suspect that the hardware graphic acceleration is not working
4. Battery life: the battery life seems to me extremely short for a new laptop whose battery life is supposed to last up to 11 hours. I suspect there is something odd with the CPU governor or frequency.

I suspect that most of these problems are due to the fact that the hardware of Lenovo IdeaPad 5 is still not supported by the current Debian kernel. It is frustrating having a new laptop and not being able to run Linux on it. I'm not new to Linux but this time it seems that I have too many problems at once and my knowledge is very limited.

Please, if anybody can help with any of this issues, I would appreciate it very much. Thanks in advance for your time and kindness.

Answer 1

I've had issues with new hardware that isn't supported in Debian 11 standard, which comes with Kernel 5.10.0-18-amd64. I had to upgrade it to Kernel 6.0 (via backports), I've documented it all on the following answer. Some of it might not be relevant to you, so cherry pick what you want:

https://askubuntu.com/a/1442750/689452

(Although ordinarily, I would answer a question thoroughly for the sake of keeping the question/answer together, and keeping all notes on it in one place, I'm not going to copy it all to Unix SE site, as it is on AskUbuntu which is part of SE)

NOTE: For me, even after the above, I kept running in to an issue where my Wi-Fi adapter kept bugging out, so I've just installed the firmware-bookworm-DI-alpha1-amd64-DVD-1.iso, but as soon as I booted, there was an update for firmware-iwlwifi 20210818-1 which I updated to 20221109-2, and it started happening again, I've just downgraded to firmware-iwlwifi=20210818-1, let's see how that fares.

Answer 2

I have finally found a solution, thanks also to the suggestion of Aubs. I post that here in case it's of help for other people with a similar problem.

I have tried to update to Kernel 6.0 via backport as proposed by Aubs and it almost solved all the problems! This means: suspension, screen brightness, animation and battery life. The only issue with that is that the WiFi adapter (whose problem was initially solved as explain in my original post) stopped working. This is because the solution found there was for the Kernel 5.10 and not for Kernel 6.0.

Luckily, I finally found a solution also for the WiFi adapter in combination with the Kernel 6.0 and now everything seems to work as expected!

These are the steps I have followed:

# 1. Edit the source.list file (for example with vi) to include the bullseye-backports line:
vi /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye-backports main

# 2. Update the packages:
apt update

# 3. Localise the backported kernel files:
apt list -a linux-image-amd64 linux-headers-amd64

# 4. Update the backported kernel files and reboot:
apt -t bullseye-backports install linux-image-amd64 linux-headers-amd64
reboot

# 5. Turn off your Security Boot in BIOS (if it's enable, in my case it wasn't)
# 6. Clone the rtl8852be driver by HRex39 using git (o simply download it from the URL in the following command):
git clone https://github.com/HRex39/rtl8852be.git -b dev

# 7. Enter the directory, compile the drivers and reboot:
cd rtl8852be
make -j8
make install
reboot

I could execute the steps above requiring an Internet connection through an old, pluggable USB-WiFi adapter. In any case, if you don't have one, the required files can be downloaded in a machine with Internet access and then moved to the Lenovo IdeaPad 5.

In my case the above procedure solved all the problems I was having with my Lenovo IdeaPad 5. Thank you very much to @Aubs for the suggestions without which I could have no solved the problems.

I think this solution will work also for Ubuntu and other Debian-based Linux distros.