aaa

Have you got the kernel-firmware package installed?

You can check with your package manager, if the kernel-firmware package isn't installed, install it.

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aaa

In Debian this used to be in a package in the "non-free" repository called "firmware-linux-nonfree". I had to look it up, but that particular firmware seems to be now in "firmware-misc-nonfree" and "firmware-linux-nonfree" now seems to be a meta package.

https://packages.debian.org/buster/f...e-misc-nonfree
https://packages.debian.org/buster/f...-linux-nonfree

You'll need to enable the repository and install via the package manager.

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You have to run the package manager as root.

aaa

Edit the sources.list file: https://wiki.debian.org/SourcesList#..._a_text_editor

The only way is to read the documentation available - hunting for easy copy and paste solutions doesn't usually go well.

//edit: There is an example sources.list on the same page: https://wiki.debian.org/SourcesList#...e_sources.list

Again, do not blindly copy and paste - if you want further guidance, you will need to post the contents of your existing sources.list file.

Yes, you could use "sudo" to do that, but it would be quicker and easier to run apt under the root user account instead (and that's likely the reason for the "permission denied" error messages).

aaa

Yes, but it would defeat the point of having a user privilege system if you made your normal unprivileged user account a "root-like" account. So if you care about your system's security, then I would advise against doing that. It's even worse running a web browser with root privileges. So it's a bad idea to make a "root-like" account, and while I could tell you how to do it; I'm not going to encourage it by saying how to do it. It's just a bad idea, period.

When you use the su command to "switch" to the root user account, it still requires knowing what root's password is. Whereas sudo on the other hand is designed to solve this problem, and therefore you would just use your normal unprivileged user account's password instead. sudo also creates it's own auditing trail in it's own log file, so if you did attempt to run a command your normal user hasn't been sudo'd to be allowed to run, sudo would record that in it's own log file.

So for example, if you had an office network, and you had a network administrator, their deputy, and say some technicians under them that needed to be able to start/stop services, install/update software; then you could "sudo" them permission to do just those things that would otherwise require root user privileges to do using sudo. Therefore they would not need to know what the root user password is, and could not do anything else outside of starting/stopping services, installing/updating software, and sudo would once again record it if they did try using sudo to do anything outside of the permissions they'd be granted with sudo - this is the problem sudo was designed to solve. Some distributions like the *buntu's use sudo to actually replace the root user account, which is an abuse of sudo IMHO - as that's not what it was designed for.

So just switch to root with the su command (eg. su -) unless you have good reason to configure sudo and sudo your normal user.

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To expand on jsbjsb001's post above - it's a common fallacy of users new to UNIX like systems to assume that they are not being "permitted" to do things on their own computer, due to running as a restricted user as standard.

Aside from it being dangerous, as described above, many user space software is simply not designed to run as the root user and will break if you attempt to do so or cause some session/configuration files to effectively become owned by root - meaning that the user will encounter errors when trying to run that programme.

It will become that appealing shortcut which invariably leads to a broken mess.

It's better to think about the operations when you would need to be root and that will be in your case only when doing package management tasks - and then think of all the occasions when you don't need to be - everything else.

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