07-02-2021, 12:18 PM
In case anyone is still using their original Pinebook - I pulled mine out of storage couple days ago and installed Debian Sid on it. Everything is working fine so far, except Bluetooth, sound, and deep sleep. The only special thing I had to do is build kernel module separately for WiFi.
I used https://d-i.debian.org/daily-images/arm6...rd-images/ to create a Debian installer SD card. Generally installer worked, but letting it do it's own thing hands-off resulted in a system that's not bootable without an SD card. To make it bootable 16MiB free space is required in the beginning of the eMMC (I didn't try using SPI flash). So I partitioned eMMC manually, creating a single ext4 partition that starts at 16MiB mark and takes all of eMMC - I didn't want the hassle with any special partitioning. After that I went through the installation, and in the end installed u-boot-sunxi and ran `u-boot-install-sunxi64 /dev/mmcblk0` (make sure you got the right device number) to install u-boot. One thing to note though is I used u-boot-sunxi from experimental - it seems the version in Unstable is not yet able to boot from ext4 partitions. After that the system boots fine on its own, but doesn't have any WiFi. To get WiFi working I cloned https://github.com/Icenowy/rtl8723cs, installed basic build dependencies (build-essential, linux-headers-arm64), cd to the folder, `make && sudo make install && sudo modprobe 8723cs`. After that I installed the rest of the packages and got a full working system. For KDE Plasma QML not to glitch all the time I had to set QT_XCB_FORCE_SOFTWARE_OPENGL to 1 (I added `QT_XCB_FORCE_SOFTWARE_OPENGL=1` line to /etc/environment).
I used https://d-i.debian.org/daily-images/arm6...rd-images/ to create a Debian installer SD card. Generally installer worked, but letting it do it's own thing hands-off resulted in a system that's not bootable without an SD card. To make it bootable 16MiB free space is required in the beginning of the eMMC (I didn't try using SPI flash). So I partitioned eMMC manually, creating a single ext4 partition that starts at 16MiB mark and takes all of eMMC - I didn't want the hassle with any special partitioning. After that I went through the installation, and in the end installed u-boot-sunxi and ran `u-boot-install-sunxi64 /dev/mmcblk0` (make sure you got the right device number) to install u-boot. One thing to note though is I used u-boot-sunxi from experimental - it seems the version in Unstable is not yet able to boot from ext4 partitions. After that the system boots fine on its own, but doesn't have any WiFi. To get WiFi working I cloned https://github.com/Icenowy/rtl8723cs, installed basic build dependencies (build-essential, linux-headers-arm64), cd to the folder, `make && sudo make install && sudo modprobe 8723cs`. After that I installed the rest of the packages and got a full working system. For KDE Plasma QML not to glitch all the time I had to set QT_XCB_FORCE_SOFTWARE_OPENGL to 1 (I added `QT_XCB_FORCE_SOFTWARE_OPENGL=1` line to /etc/environment).
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