Official Debian support!

[snoopy_ca]

Here the official bug report:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugrepor...bug=973323

[eduapof]

Here the official bug report:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugrepor...bug=973323

I have some questions

1) What is the forecast to fix this bug? ("Booting using the fdt blob at 0x01f00000")

2) I am having problems with the card not booting too. The Monitor has no signal. Precious to try many times until successful boot with video. Is this also linked to the Debian distribution bug? I believe so, because with other distributions I have no problems.

3) What is the official forum to report bugs and tests for this development package?

Tnks !!!

[James Good]

Hello everyone,


I am very please to let you all know that many of our flagship devices, including key SBCs as well as Pinebook Pro and the Pinebook, now have official Debian support.
Download

Luke,
If I am reading this correctly (and if I read the 'readme.txt' file correctly), I should be able to take one of the image files listed (for instance:

firmware.a64-olinuxino.img.gz) burn it to a micro USB card and install that image and the related operating system on a PineBook Pro.  Is this correct?  Are there any other steps that I must take to get the new image running?
Just wondering because I am having massive amounts of trouble getting and keeping my PBP running.
Thank you,
James Good

[toons]

Is there a solution for that booting problem right now?
I can't seem to get past the installer's "Booting using the fdt blob at 0x01f00000" problem whatever I try..

Do the older firmware/partition images work? Anyone has them? The link in the first post only has November and December images.

[kuleszdl]

@toons The problem with older images in Debian is always that the images need to correspond with the data on the mirrors. If this doesn't match your installation will fail at a later stage.

To work towards a "known good" state therefore would imho require saving both the images as well as mirroring the Debian archives at this time.

[toons]

@kuleszdl

Should that devuan/debian guide of yours work right now? I tried it but system wont boot past the fdt blob thing. I guess I'm not understanding something here. Is there a way around the problem?

UPDATE:
The problem seems to be PREBOOT="usb start".. can be disabled in u-boot defconfig or by doing a manual usb stop on every boot.

[kuleszdl]

The guide should work, at least I had my pinebookpro working with it. However, it had severe issues with running from microSD and I was unable to get the display working. I also tried the "official" partition.img and firmware from Debian (build from Dec. 24th) but I didn't see anything on the screen.

I assume the current Debian builds still work only in console mode as they won't ship the necessary display blob?

Update: The current kernel (5.10.4) seems to be broken and neither boots on the rockpro64 nor on the pinebookpro. It works on the rock64, though.

[kuleszdl]

@toons Thank you for the hint! But this is rather a kernel issue, not an u-boot problem?

I tried "usb stop" in the u-boot prompt but then my console was lost. Therefore, I recompiled u-boot with PREBOOT=y uncommented - this did the trick here, many thanks!

[igorp]

The guide should work, at least I had my pinebookpro working with it. However, it had severe issues with running from microSD and I was unable to get the display working. I also tried the "official" partition.img and firmware from Debian (build from Dec. 24th) but I didn't see anything on the screen.

I assume the current Debian builds still work only in console mode as they won't ship the necessary display blob?

Update: The current kernel (5.10.4) seems to be broken and neither boots on the rockpro64 nor on the pinebookpro. It works on the rock64, though.

Blob is not just for graphics routines, it (might - don't know if Debian uses open source boot process, for Armbian you can check here) already be needed to boot the board ... BTW improved Debian works. In CLI, with desktop, ...

[kuleszdl]

@igorp I have the PBP running without said display blob already, so it is definitely not required to get the internal display working. See this thread:

https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=12534