An unofficial Debian Installer for Pinebook Pro

[richbl]

you can install firefox and/or chromium from unstable, also.

This worked for me.

Thanks

[xmixahlx]

ty @danielt !

also see this thread for Bluetooth topics. Manjaro has additional fw and custom scripts to enable Bluetooth...
https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=8731

[phs]

Thank you all for volunteering your time and effort to make this experience.  Recently my PBP ANSI arrived and I wanted to report on my experience using this installer.  I look forward to using this as my daily driver, though before that happens I am interested in helping test or develop.  Reading over the thread the list of actionables seems a bit scattered right now.

All installs were made after running the update script in the stock image.  Additionally I've applied the recent keyboard firmware upgrade from https://forum.pine64.org/announcements.php?aid=23 .  I am not attempting to connect any keyboard, monitor or other peripherals, it is just the PBP with power plugged into the wall.

I believe the installer version used in all cases is git sha f77e28744525cd0f7063ecac06eda4d6cdd526f3

My first attempt was installing to a 8GB U1 microSD I had laying around.  No LUKS, though I intended to later use this install to set LUKS up in a second install on the internal storage.  In tasksel I opted for the gnome 3 desktop, ssh server and laptop options (105 keyboard, the three en_US locales, default locale en_US UTF).  debootstrap ran successfully, but the produced image would not boot.  Instead I saw something that sounds like #85: a blank black screen with a simple cursor sporadically appearing in the upper left hand corner.  I attempted to reach other gettys with F1-F6 and various modifier keys but never could.

My next attempts used a different 16GB U1 microSD that I believe came out of a beaglebone black.  This worked.  There were a few iterations here in which I initially started with what I thought would be a bare/conservative configuration and progressively stepped back towards the one used in attempt #1.  All of them worked, and eventually I was looking at a live gnome 3.  After confirming the ram footprint I did one more cycle and switched to MATE.

Attempting to run firefox ESR revealed the "illegal instruction" error that others have described.  I attempted to switch to epiphany, but could never get it to render a page.  Firefox in buster backports had the same illegal instruction issue.  Finally (in a new, clean install) I enabled armhf and used it to install FF, similar to #3 :

Code:

$ sudo apt remove firefox-esr
$ sudo dpkg --add-architecture armhf
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install firefox-esr:armhf

Since I didn't keep epiphany as in #3, these commands indeed turned over a lot of packages, but seemingly without harm.  This firefox runs and seems snappy, I am typing this post on it now.  Installing armhf firefox in this way did not require any changes to the installer or the ARCH variable.

At this point my experience was similar to #39 in a few ways.  The screen brightness up/down buttons did not work for me, but I was able to reproduce the solution there with
 a small twist.  My udev file looks like this:

Code:

$ cat /etc/udev/hwdb.d/10-usb-kbd.hwdb
evdev:input:b0003v258Ap001E*
KEYBOARD_KEY_700a5=brightnessdown
KEYBOARD_KEY_700a6=brightnessup

# KEYBOARD_KEY_70066=sleep
$ sudo udevadm hwdb --update

For those unfamiliar with the file format, there are leading spaces before the KEYBOARD_KEY lines that are important, which the code block here is suppressing.  I also alerted udev to the changes with the udevadm command mentioned above.  It seems that something (MATE?) already has something at the "sleep" keybinding, and so it is omitted here.  If it is included then both handlers (sleeping, and presenting a shutdown dialog that turns the machine off after 60 seconds) are run.

I have also had some trouble resuming from sleep, with the machine instead simply rebooting and losing my session.  So far it has happened perhaps three times.  In all cases the machine was plugged into the wall, and the lid was closed for 10 minutes or more.  When opening the lid, the power LED is green but the screen is blank; only after holding power until the LED dimmed and turning it on again was I able to get normal functionality.

I did not test plugging anything in to the 3.5'' audio jack.  Finally when starting up, I hear two small pops from the speakers (as if power was abruptly cut and applied), perhaps 5 seconds apart.  Perhaps this is the mentioned "annoying quiet noise".

At this point I have not yet tried pointing the installer at the internal storage (since it seems I'm going to leave gnome 3 behind and am now shopping around for DMs.)

The trackpad seems a bit sensitive, and will move my cursor if accidentally brushed even while quickly typing.

I have not yet tried any bluetooth functionality.

I have not yet tried any video acceleration functionality.

I see "Direct firmware load for rockchip/dptx.bin failed with error -2" lines in my dmesg; I have not attempted any of the described fixes.

[delcaran]

My first attempt was installing to a 8GB U1 microSD I had laying around.  No LUKS, though I intended to later use this install to set LUKS up in a second install on the internal storage.  In tasksel I opted for the gnome 3 desktop, ssh server and laptop options (105 keyboard, the three en_US locales, default locale en_US UTF).  debootstrap ran successfully, but the produced image would not boot.  Instead I saw something that sounds like #85: a blank black screen with a simple cursor sporadically appearing in the upper left hand corner.  I attempted to reach other gettys with F1-F6 and various modifier keys but never could.

Same issue with a similar microSD.
But I repeated the installation one more time on the same USB, and this time it booted. Restarted the system for a few times just to be sure it always worked, then I installed the same "release" on the eMMC: installation aborted while installing the base system claiming "no space left on device" (device was the 64GB eMMC).
Also, from this moment forward I couldn't login to the debian "live" on the sdcard: the login screen accepts my user/pass, shows a black screen and then back again to login screen.
I'm now back on stock Debian image.

[e-minguez]

I've updated the wiki to include the bluetooth stuff (I didn't tested it tho) and the firefox armhf instructions. See https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/Pinebo..._Installer (and feel free to edit it, we all have permissions using user/pass from the forum in the wiki )

[xmixahlx]

i am on sid arm64 currently. pulled a few packages from experimental (sway). some x11/login manager problems happening that I am not too bothered to figure out in unstable currently. bluetooth is working with the additional fw blobs from manjaro git. chromium is stable.

an updated kernel would be huge: tsys updated the kernel for 5.5-rc7+panfrost-fixes. see the separate branch in git. can you package @danielt ?

sway + wayland + panfrost working pretty well, I must say.

haven't addressed video hardware acceleration etc yet. prob after a new kernel.

what is your kernel update process?

cheers,
michael

[danielt]

an updated kernel would be huge: tsys updated the kernel for 5.5-rc7+panfrost-fixes. see the separate branch in git. can you package @danielt ?

I was planning to wait for v5.5 to be officially released before switching versions but panfrost fixes are a big deal so I'll see what I can do here.

In any case for the kernel there is not currently any place you can send a pull request to so I'll will prioritize kernel changes over installer changes (it's not that the installer doesn't matter but other people can make installer changes and send in pull requests).

---

I've updated the wiki to include the bluetooth stuff (I didn't tested it tho) and the firefox armhf instructions. See https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/Pinebo..._Installer (and feel free to edit it, we all have permissions using user/pass from the forum in the wiki )

Great stuff. Thanks for kicking this off... I have added a link to this the first post of this thread (I'll also try add it to the README on github).

[e-minguez]

you can install firefox and/or chromium from unstable, also.

This worked for me.

Thanks

Could you please add the steps in the wiki as a reference? Thanks!

[hcal]

Does anyone have an issue with Firefox and Youtube or other video sites? I'm able to play videos if I'm careful to not let the mouse cursor move, but the tab crashes if the cursor moves across the page (maybe just the video). Gnome-Web doesn't have this problem, but it drops a lot of frames. Firefox plays the video very smoothly when it doesn't crash. I had this issue on arm64 and my current armhf install.

[sharp]

I made a small script to install Bluetooth and brightness key tweaks over top a fresh Debian install. Hopefully I can add more as fixes for other things which are not suitable for the installer become available.

https://gitlab.com/sharph/pinebook-pro-d...all-script