(07-08-2021, 11:18 AM)KiteX3 Wrote: I tried this out today and it actually booted with a virtual terminal command line installer. Nice! I wasn't able to install since it didn't seem to include the firmware drivers for the Pinebook Pro (and it seems to be a netinstall image) and I hadn't backed up my current Daniel Thompson's installer image, but it's still nice to be able to run *something* that's mainline Debian on my PBP.
Edit: I got back home and tried to complete the netinstall process, but unfortunately it didn't work; it failed the "Installing Software" stage and then after that the "Making bootable" stage, and after being forced to abort the installation it (naturally) wouldn't boot. I'm still glad the installer at least started, but it certainly wasn't ready to do a complete functional Debian install.
I've followed the official installer through on my original PB, and the issue I found is that by default the way it partitions eMMC doesn't leave any space for u-boot. It also doesn't install u-boot automatically. So if you use that installer you need to:
- make sure you partition manually and the very first usable partition starts at exactly 16MiB mark - this part is a bit hard to do from within the installer itself though as it prefers decimal prefixes instead of binary.
- after installation you may need to either use a trick with yanking the SD card out as soon as u-boot loaded from it--that can result in u-boot loading from SD card but then booting system from eMMC instead of going back into installer--or going through installer until it loads the necessary components to detect eMMC, then switch to another VT (say, VT2), mount eMMC, mount other necessary file systems, chroot into newly installed system, install u-boot-rockchip, and run `u-boot-install-rockchip /dev/mmcblk2` - just make sure you use correct device name for eMMC.
You will still need to manually install WiFi/BT firmware though, last time I checked it's not yet packaged in Debian.
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