02. Firmware, GRUB, and Packages

Recap

Last time, we left off at setting up sudo on a fresh barebones install. Here, we will continue with the essential and boring stuff. However, we have to get this out of the way before we can get to anything that's remotely fun.

Firmware... or is it?

See, when I said last time that Debian 13 came with firmware, I wasn't lying.
Normally, during the installation, your device is automatically scanned and the appropriate firmware is installed, which is great!
That said, the last time I tried installing Debian 13 on my actual hardware, I had not one, but two failed attempts, both related to firmware issues. So tell me, why is that? WHY? (If you remember, I did foreshadow this in the last post when I said the OS needs to fit with my hardware. You got it, right? You didn't need me to point it out, right? Right?) I do not know.
What I do know is that on my first attempt, the Wi-Fi card was not even detected; it wasn't working. On my second attempt, it was working until it wasn't, and to this day, I still do not know why that happened, though I suspect it was a firmware issue too.
So after this, I committed to manually downloading the firmware of my Wi-Fi card just in case. That way, at least I can blame myself for doing a shitty job.

Let's do it manually! First ensure non-free and non-free-firmware repos are enabled:

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

First thing to notice is that all the lines starting with deb already have non-free-firmware, which is what we need, but let's just add two more things to avoid all future headaches, that being contrib and non-free. Respectively, they cover packages that are free and open-source but use non-free software, and packages that are proprietary and closed-source like some drivers.

So the deb lines should look something like this:

deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ trixie main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security trixie-security main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ trixie-updates main contrib non-free non-free-firmware

Then:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install firmware-iwlwifi

It's important to note that I am using firmware-iwlwifi because I have an Intel Wi-Fi card, and this firmware package only covers those. Other Wi-Fi card manufacturers come with other firmware packages, usually under the form firmware-<something>.

Then finally, reload the drivers:

sudo modprobe -r iwlwifi && sudo modprobe iwlwifi

Done with firmware, hopefully.

GRUB time! Not really

I'm tweaking GRUB, but not just for the sake of it; there are two specific things I want to accomplish.
First, I want to skip the boot menu entirely. I don't need to dual-boot, and if the OS ever fails to boot, I prefer using a Live USB to fix issues rather than GRUB’s Recovery Mode.
Second, I want to enable zswap, what is zswap you might ask? It's a great kernel feature that intercepts swap requests and compresses them into a dedicated RAM pool instead of writing directly to disk. If that RAM pool fills up, it simply decompresses the oldest page and flushes it to disk. It's nice because it’s fast, reduces latency, and saves precious disk I/O.

To apply the above, simply give a visit to /etc/default/grub:

sudo nano /etc/default/grub

Skip the boot menu:

GRUB_TIMEOUT=0
GRUB_TIMEOUT_STYLE=hidden

And enable zswap:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet zswap.enabled=1"

To finally apply the edits:

sudo update-grub

They'll take effect after the next reboot.

Packages

Last section for this post, and it's really simple, purge the useless.
Didn't I go for a barebones install? Yes.
Does it mean all the packages on the VM are useful? Apparently no.

Some useless packages downloaded still; yes, it's quite absurd. I didn't ask for it and I was still given it. Why? I don't know. (Just noticed that me not knowing is a recurrent theme. Oh well, what do I know...)

So, I'll hunt 'em lil' unwanted packages and purge them. But how? I will not go into details but from what I have compiled, the following packages are useless and safe to purge.

Important, mark these packages:

sudo apt-mark manual bluetooth bluez iw wireless-tools wireless-regdb wpasupplicant powertop alsa-ucm-conf alsa-topology-conf

This tells apt that those packages are to keep. This is essential because when you try to purge task-laptop, apt suddenly thinks that all those are unnecessary just because they were automatically installed alongside it.

Now, purge these packages (yes, even cron, it's mostly legacy and systemd has its own timers now, move on):

sudo apt purge tasksel task-english task-laptop reportbug python3-reportbug installation-report doc-debian debian-faq inetutils-telnet ispell iamerican ibritish wamerican dictionaries-common anacron cron cron-daemon-common eject bzip2 bsdextrautils
sudo apt autoremove --purge

With that, we exorcised all the useless packages.

Wrapping Up

This largely covers the boring setup part. The next post will cover the final bits we have yet to go over, such as audio, network management, and core dependencies, after which, we will get to the more exciting parts!

Written on: 2026-07-23