Installing debian on pinebook pro (deb installer/emmc)
#3
Moonwalkers is right, AFAIK; U-Boot is the problem with the Debian installer. I was able to install mainline Debian on my Pinebook Pro (US keyboard) by installing Tow-Boot [1] to SPI flash as my U-Boot, which means Debian doesn't need to handle it at all. (Really, it shouldn't have to.) I then modified the Debian install image by opening it on a second computer and placing the Pinebook Pro firmware files [2] into the installer's firmware directories (I think I needed to create those). The result, after a little bit of tinkering (which I unfortunately do not remember completely), was a fully functional mainline Debian install using the official zcat'd Debian-provided images [3]. The only problem I've encountered is that Tow-Boot frequently stalls during the boot process, a problem I also faced while wrestling with Manjaro's U-Boot, which makes me think Tow-Boot inherited it from U-Boot when it was forked.

As a warning, doing anything with the SPI flash can be a little dangerous. Recovering from a mistake might require a serial cable [4]; I invested in one of these (third-party off Amazon confirmed to work with PBP, not the official one) before I installed Tow-Boot, though I never thankfully needed to use it to save my PBP.

[1] https://tow-boot.org/
[2] https://github.com/cobratbq/pinebook-pro
[3] https://d-i.debian.org/daily-images/arm6...rd-images/
[4] https://pine64.com/product/pinebook-pine...l-console/
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RE: Installing debian on pinebook pro (deb installer/emmc) - by KiteX3 - 01-24-2022, 11:19 AM

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