Debian 8 on the Intel NUC5PPYH

By Abhijit Menon-Sen <>

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.