Gateway NV53A

Linux

Debian

Installation

Debian installation of Stretch went fairly well on this machine. However, there was one problem where Debian did not pick up the graphics driver properly, and the following error was presented by the kernel:

Radeon kernel modesetting for r600 or later requires firmware-linux-nonfree

The solution for fixing this was to first add non-free and contrib packages to apt in /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ wheezy main contrib non-free

and then to install the following package:

apt-get update
apt-get install firmware-linux-nonfree

After doing this and rebooting, the kernel booted cleanly and there were no issues.