Debian looking for testers with Apple M1/M2 machines

[Posted July 2, 2025 by jzb]

Debian's Bananas team has put out a call for people with Apple M1 or M2 systems to help test Debian on those machines:

The Bananas Team has set up an installer at with images for GNOME, KDE and console installations. While we'd like to build an actual Debian installer sooner or later (we may need a heads-up from the Debian Images team for that), at this time we only provide an asahi-type installer, which installs both the "bootloader" and the OS partitions to disk from the network (as opposed to only installing the bootloader and then letting you install Debian using a d-i USB stick). We haven't forked Trixie from Testing yet, so what you'll get is Debian Testing quite deep into the freeze.

Glory to NoisyCoil

Posted Jul 2, 2025 16:02 UTC (Wed) by ah (subscriber, #85449) [Link]

Lots of heavy lifting done by NoisyCoil to make this happen!

USB-C keyboards currently required on M2 minis and come say hello

Posted Jul 2, 2025 21:32 UTC (Wed) by noisycoil (subscriber, #178152) [Link] (2 responses)

Hi all!

M2 mini users, please beware of https://salsa.debian.org/bananas-team/wip/debian-asahi-im...: due to an upstream bug, a USB-C keyboard (or USB-A keyboard connected via USB-C adapter) is currently required to install the console version on these platforms. The others are unaffected, as far as we know.

Feel free to drop by #debian-bananas on IRC/Matrix if you want to help or say hello. Cheers!

USB-C keyboards currently required on M2 minis and come say hello

Posted Jul 3, 2025 12:17 UTC (Thu) by kragil (guest, #34373) [Link] (1 responses)

I had Asahi running on an M1 mac mini and for some reason my Lenovo Thinkpad keyboard would not work in USB KVM. It did work on macOS .. well, it worked in Linux at first and then it stopped working....

Linux on M CPUs is still a WIP. Buyers beware.

USB-C keyboards currently required on M2 minis and come say hello

Posted Jul 3, 2025 12:36 UTC (Thu) by jannex (subscriber, #43525) [Link]

The broken Lenovo Thinkpad keyboard USB keyboard is regression in the Kernel. The support for For ACPI power state switching on some lenovo tablet devices introduced a hard runtime dependency on ACPI.
The issue is fixed in asahi downstream kernel but I need get a fix upstream. Two approaches failed so far.

This is exciting to see!

Posted Jul 3, 2025 14:13 UTC (Thu) by chefjacob (subscriber, #176688) [Link]

I had been running Thomas Glanzmann's Bookworm port for a while but ended up switching to the Fedora remix. I'll have to take this for a spin soon. thanks to all who have worked on it!