Installing debian on pinebook pro (deb installer/emmc)

[moonwalkers]

Wonder how the debian installer works in that case? Maybe it does do something differently! But where is the mr. fixit updated uboot btw -- I could only find full os'es/distros and not just the bootloader files themselves. The emmc I can confirm is partitioned as MBR btw.

I did notice another package in debian called u-boot-menu which I installed and tried using by running u-boot-update in the chroot.

This then created /boot/extlinux and /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf. I then changed the "append" line in that file from what it said (append root=UUID=d08e60a1-9506-4368-bd55-55d9bf538f2d) to say append root=ROOT_DEBIAN . Re-ran u-boot-install-rockchip then exited out of the chroot and did e2label /dev/sda5 ROOT_DEBIAN. Shut down the rockpro64, took the emmc off the emmc to usb adapter and placed onto the rockpro64 itself, ejected the sd card and powered back on.

This time I got a boot menu with 2 options although it still hangs with "Starting kernel ..." x.x

I don't see any debian version of bsp u-boot not sure where that could be found.

ljones

You won't find BSP u-boot in Debian repos. That said, if u-boot-rockchip you installed prints out some text during early boot - it should be good enough to boot Debian kernel. So long as you have kernel 5.10.something or newer - you should have a bootable system. If you're still relatively new to Linux on ARM I would suggest you start with the simplest possible setup - single ext4 partition starting at 16MiB mark (sector 32768). If you install u-boot-menu it should automatically take care of creating the correct extlinux.conf for you, and even if it doesn't - you probably should change /etc/default/u-boot and re-run `sudo u-boot-update` instead of changing extlinux.conf directly. You also should not forget `LABEL=` if you want to specify your root by FS label instead of UUID. As in `root=LABEL=ROOT_DEBIAN` instead of `root=ROOT_DEBIAN`. If you have a separate /boot you will want to either install a package that copies device tree files to /boot for you automatically (`flash-kernel`, I believe), or copy them there yourself - by default u-boot-menu will point u-boot in extlinux.conf to device tree files location is /usr/lib/, where they are unpacked by the package manager when you install a kernel, but that location is inaccessible when u-boot loads kernel if you have separate /boot. If you copy device tree files manually - you should make sure extlinux.conf points u-boot to them.