An unofficial Debian Installer for Pinebook Pro

[wdt]

Well, except for android, linux on arm is a bit immature, let alone aarch64,
this did not really exist 5 years ago
About the bluetooth, check to see if firmware version is the same
(debian vrs red hat)
dmesg |grep -i firm OR |grep -i bcm ,, write down exact version #'s
For this wifi/bluetooth chip, also a bit immature
This chip, bcm4345 seems to have a number of variants, in rpi, apple
I think config file is ls -l /lib/firmware/brcm/*43456*pinebook*txt
The rpi has this added config, it may help or may not
claimed to help for orangepi, in its config
--------
btc_mode=1
btc_params8=0x4e20
btc_params1=0x7530
------------

[xmixahlx]

sorry, i missed these posts - i've been away with IRL responsibilities. see pbp-tools and my debian-installer fork for solutions to all of these issues... kernel, audio, function keys, wireless, bluetooth, sway, and more are all configured by default on debian bullseye.

[wasgurd]

How's the project?  Are you planning to update the kernel, etc?

How far I can understand, Official Debian doesn't work on PBP and we continue use your splendid build.

[JaredT66]

Recently I picked up a thunderbolt dock, with high hopes that it would work on the PBP as well as my other laptops. So far I have everything but video. I might toss the default Manjaro image on an SD and see if that fares better. Anyone run into a similar issue / solution on debian?

Also wanted to note that I do experience some screen (glitches?, tearing?, artifacting?) always in my upper right corner. I'm guessing a cinnamon issue. Running the mouse over that corner always fixes it for a while.

[danielt]

How's the project?  Are you planning to update the kernel, etc?

How far I can understand, Official Debian doesn't work on PBP and we continue use your splendid build.

I've currently got a v5.8 kernel in testing but it needs a few more small tweaks.

[fastcat]

I've currently got a v5.8 kernel in testing but it needs a few more small tweaks.

One thing I've been missing is the requisite kernel drivers (not to mention user space packages...) to enable hardware accelerated video decoding. Is the kernel side of that included in your 5.8 update?

Would it be useful for folks to try out your 5.8 kernel and provide feedback?

[nbxmike]

I'm trying to install to the eMMC, I can't get it to happen with the --no-reread flag.  Any thoughts?  I'd prefer to use this script to get arm64 support rather than the armhf in the image file.

Thanks

Update:  Edited the script to add --force to the partitioning, it seems to have partitioned the memory card, not the eMMC.

[soloquintett]

I would like to report two issues i had:
1. Last night my pinebook (fresh debian install with kernel 5.5) crashed (froze, probably ran out of memory+swap) after forcefully restarting, i was dropped into the (intitramfs) shell. The only information i could find there, was that my root drive (nvme, linked from extlinux.conf) was not found. Booting from an SD card however shows the drive. I could decrypt it and save my data. Now i am reinstalling.. Did anyone experience this? It does not really bother me, but I worry if it will happen again in the far future, ruining my day..

2. Reinstalling, I decided I want btrfs-snapshot capabillity, to be able to recover from a broken rootFS. However changing the install script to

Code:

sudo mkfs.btrfs -L ...

instead of

Code:

sudo mkfs.ext4 -FL ...

Does not boot.

creating a normal ext4 root partition and copying the content

Code:

sudo cp -ar /mnt/mmcblk2p6 /mnt/btrfs_nvme

also does not boot.

So is btrfs not supported by initramfs?

Any inside would be great.
Thank you!

[danielt]

I've currently got a v5.8 kernel in testing but it needs a few more small tweaks.

One thing I've been missing is the requisite kernel drivers (not to mention user space packages...) to enable hardware accelerated video decoding. Is the kernel side of that included in your 5.8 update?

Would it be useful for folks to try out your 5.8 kernel and provide feedback?

Not at the moment. The problems at present are related to the compiler.

[xmixahlx]

if it is the neon complier issue... are you using gcc 10? just step back to gcc 9.x. or use a git gcc (master is fixed).

hardware decoding working great with the linux build script in pbp-tools.