This is a continuation of my previous topic for @Skywalker71.
Now I show how I installed Davinci Resolve 18.6 on my Debian system, but intentionally don’t give a step-by-step instruction.
First a Debian system needs to be installed of course, I assume this is done already.
Davinci can be downloaded from here, it is a .run file.
From here you can grab the newest, just like any older version. I tell about the version 18.6, that’s proven to work.
Make sure to download the free version, unless you have a licence for the studio.
For my comfort, I transform the official installer into a .deb file for that I use the makeresolvedeb script from Daniel Tufvesson.
How to use it, it’s there on that site. Not a rocket-science.
(You may need to install some dependencies for the script before it can work.)
After that installing Davinci Resolve is as easy as dpkg -i davinci.deb or the like, you’ll see.
Congrats, Davinci Resolve is installed! 
But it doesn’t work yet, as the OpenCL “dialect” it speaks is not “understood” by Debian 
I ask die-hard Debian lovers and maybe developers now to look the other way, because the Debian wiki says: Don’t break Debian!
And this is exactly, what I did in order to use Davinci on Debian 12 with the Radeon card.
(Subtitle may be: “Don’t try this at home!” 
)
So Davinci requires an OpenCL dialect, which Debian 12 cannot talk using mesa_opencl, as it still does not cope with the Navi23 cards, which family my RX6600XT belongs to.
So what I did was to bring a FrankenDebian alive 
My general advice is that before installing anything, it is wise to take a system snapshot.
So when things go wrong, it can be restored in 5 minutes, and show can go on.
Taking a system snapshot is especially a good idea before dangerous installations, and installing AMDGPU OpenCL drivers is really something like that
For that purpose I use Systemback, but Timeshift could be used too.
I made quite a few iterations on what and how to install, the first attempt was to install rocm 5.7.2
as this was reported to work on Pop OS.
After multiple trial and error I found that the 5.7.3 version works in my case.
For that grab the amd_gpu_install package:
https://repo.radeon.com/amdgpu-install/5.7.3/ubuntu/jammy/
Install it, that just places a script basically.
(Remember what Dabian wiki says: installing software from random websites is a bad habit .
I broke the law…
Execute the installer script that package brought using these pramateters:
sudo amdgpu-install --usecase=opencl --no-dkms
Remember what Dabian wiki says:
Don’t use GPU manufacturer install scripts
— ooops I did it again…
But the script will fail, because there are some dependencies, and in lack of those packages the install fails.
These are:
- libpython3.10_3.10.4-3_amd64.deb
- libmpdec3_2.5.1-2build2_amd64.deb
- libpython3.10-minimal_3.10.4-3_amd64.deb
- libpython3.10-stdlib_3.10.4-3
- amd64.deb python3.10_3.10.4-3_amd64.deb
- python3.10-minimal_3.10.4-3_amd64.deb
(Now I just hope I did not forget something…)
You need to grab these, and install on Debian.
Remeber Debian wiki: * Ubuntu, Mint or other derivative repositories are not compatible with Debian!
I’m really a bad guy now. But after all, it works.
You can hunt for those packages on Launchpad, for example:
After you have these dependencies installed, the amd install script finishes succesfully.
Passing the parameters to the script I showed you, causes a minimal impact on install size, and gets only what’s important for Davinci. (My very first attempt drew in more than 20GB of packages, basically doubling the size of my installation… I save you this trouble 
)
I have a “home repository” in which I collected packages I install onto our computers, such as Zoom, Discord, etc… I have my version of Davinci in that repository, so I just install it via
apt install davinci-resolve
also have those dependencies collected, so the install script does not fail, just installs those deps when necessary.
This is how I got DR on Debian working - sure I made some ugly deeds, but noone can deny it works:
But, now I think, I may have found the cause of that ‘Disk Descriptor Error’. May be it was caused by my WiFi adapter which was connected at the time of each installation. May be it was drawing more power than it should and the Live USB was not getting the power those distros were expecting. Fedora may bypassed it, but for others, including Debian, they may expected more power for the Live USB which might help the USB drive to make them understand its presence. I am not sure but I will give it a try for one last time.
Then after watching some YouTube videos and after some trial and error, I got it figured out. But, here, some question came to my mind. In a video, it was shown that I have to make an ‘EFI partition’, a ‘Swap partition’, a ‘Home partition’ and last a ‘Root partition’. But when I did that after creating the ‘Home partition’ the rest of the SSD space showed as ‘UNUSABLE’ and I could not create a ‘ROOT’ partition. But after some trial and error and with the help of another video, when I created, first the ‘EFI’ partition, 2nd a ‘SWAP’ partition and then the rest of the free space as the ‘Root’ ( / ) then the install went smoothly. The question is WHY?!
