Resolving Display and WiFi Issues on Debian 12(DELL 5550, Display driver and Intel wireless firmware)

Recently I installed Debian 12 bookworm for a change, I encountered a couple of frustrating issues with my system's display driver and Intel wireless WiFi adapter. My DELL laptop had the latest Intel Arc Graphics, but the live Debian version installed kernel version 6.1, which did not have the drivers.

naveenr@latitude5550:~$ lspci -k | grep -EA3 'VGA'
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Meteor Lake-P [Intel Arc Graphics] (rev 08)
Subsystem: Dell Meteor Lake-P [Intel Arc Graphics]
Kernel driver in use: i915
Kernel modules: i915, xe

Symptoms:

• Very few display resolutions supported
• Display brightness not working
• Laptop special keys not working(like brightness increase and decrease )
• Bluetooth not working
• WiFi not working.

Fortunately, I was able to find a solution that got everything working properly.

Display Driver Problems

The recommended solution was to upgrade the Linux kernel and firmware packages to the versions available in the Debian "bookworm-backports" repository. To do this, I ran the following commands:

sudo apt -t bookworm-backports install linux-image-amd64

This updated my kernel to the latest version and all display issues got resolved(after debian reboot).

Resolving the WiFi Issue

In addition to the display problems, I was also having trouble connecting to my wireless network. My Intel WiFi adapter was not being recognized properly, and I couldn't get an internet connection. Again, I turned to the Debian forums and found that this was a common issue with Debian 12 and Intel wireless adapters. The solution was to install the firmware-iwlwifi package from the "bookworm-backports" repository, which I did using the command above.

sudo apt install firmware-iwlwifi/bookworm-backports



After running these commands, my display issues were resolved, and my wireless adapter started working correctly(after debian reboot). I was able to get back to using my Debian 12 system without any further problems.

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