Hassath's birthday present this year was an
Intel NUC5PPYH
(with 8GB of DDR3 RAM and a 250GB SSD) to stand in at home for her
ageing Thinkpad X131E. It works fine with Debian 8.
It took some time for the machine to reach our remote mountain abode,
but we have it working nicely after spending a few hours wrestling with
it. Here's a quick summary of our experience
(InstallingDebianOn/Intel/NUC5PPYH
wasn't really useful).
Display problems
Hassath loves her old Samsung SyncMaster 172s monitor (1024x768, VGA)
and resists the idea of a new wide-format monitor. Getting the NUC to
work properly with this display took the most time (but none of it was
the display's fault).
We connected the monitor to the NUC's VGA port and were greeted with a
"Video mode not supported" error on the monitor. The debian installer's
text-mode display worked fine after boot, but we couldn't see any of the
UEFI setup menus. Fortunately, we were able to sidestep the problem by
using an HDMI→VGA adapter that we had ordered “just in case”. Using the
HDMI output resolved the display problems with the UEFI menus.
After we installed Debian (8.1 from a USB stick created from the DVD
image), X wouldn't start. The intel driver didn't work, and Xorg fell
back to the VESA driver, and
died while trying to set the video mode.
(Also, virtual terminals didn't work at all until we added an xorg.conf
snippet to force the resolution to 1024x768.) It didn't work even with
the DVI-D input (via another “just in case” HDMI→DVI-D cable) on my
monitor.
We stumbled around for a while, but we eventually got it working. The
key was to apt-get dist-upgrade against jessie-backports to install a
new kernel and drivers (e.g., libdrm-intel1). We also updated the BIOS
from revision 0054 to
revision 0058,
but I am not sure that this was necessary, or even helpful. Xorg works
with the new kernel and Intel driver. We didn't bother to check if the
VESA driver would also work if we forced its use.
(Aside: we had no UEFI boot-related problems at all. We didn't even need
to try the legacy boot option, either for the installation from the USB
stick or to boot the installed system.)
Everything else worked
The Ethernet controller is a Realtek RTL8168h, which works out of the
box with the r8169 driver. Installing the firmware-realtek package got
rid of an “unable to load firmware patch” message, but the adapter
worked fine without it.
The wireless controller is an
Intel dual band wireless-AC 3165,
which required the new kernel from backports (4.8, though 4.2+ should
have worked from what we read) and the firmware-iwlwifi package to be
installed. It worked fine thereafter.
The audio controller is an Intel "Braswell" 2284, which works out of the
box with the snd_hda_intel driver. Audio output goes simultaneously to
the headphone connector on the front panel and the glowing red S/PDIF
plus headphone connector on the back. We did not try S/PDIF audio (no
cable, no devices) or HDMI audio (no audio port on the HDMI→VGA
adapter) or recording (no mic—or at least, no mic on my desk).
The Intel Bluetooth 4.0 controller (8087:0a2a) works out of the box with
the btusb driver. We were able to pair with an Android phone and a
Bluetooth speaker. We were not able to play audio to the speaker, but
that is probably not a problem with the NUC, because we didn't manage to
get it working with any of our other machines either.
We didn't try the SDXC card slot or the infrared sensor.
Update (2017-01-18): The SDXC card slot works fine. I used it to
write a Raspbian image.