04-26-2020, 02:11 PM
Debian recently added support for the Pinebook Pro and RockPro64, adding to their existing support for the original Pinebook, Rock64, and Pine64 Plus! I haven't gotten the chance to try these yet but these are presumably based on the mainline kernel, given that Debian Unstable is now using Linux 5.5 with all the necessary patches for the RK3399 backported and Mesa 20.0.4.
Images are being built everyday over at https://d-i.debian.org/daily-images/arm6...rd-images/ where the readme has instructions for how to combine the device-specific partition table and u-boot with the device-independent partition.img.gz that contains the installer such that you can make a bootable SD card with them both.
After being booted, the installer "runs completely in the system's RAM and does not need to load anything from the SD card anymore, so you can delete all existing partitions and use the full card for installing Debian. It is recommended to use the 'guided partitioning' option in the installer to create a proper partition layout on the SD card."
Given that these images purely contain the installer, you'll definitely need an internet connection for it to retrieve the rest of the packages and install a full system. I also believe these don't contain any non-free firmware, so you may need to install over ethernet and then add the non-free repo and install any required firmware afterwards. I'm very interested to see what's currently functional and if there's any unexpected snags or hangups, and I'll definitely update this post with what I figure out after receiving my Pinebook Pro and trying to install this image on it! :)
Images are being built everyday over at https://d-i.debian.org/daily-images/arm6...rd-images/ where the readme has instructions for how to combine the device-specific partition table and u-boot with the device-independent partition.img.gz that contains the installer such that you can make a bootable SD card with them both.
After being booted, the installer "runs completely in the system's RAM and does not need to load anything from the SD card anymore, so you can delete all existing partitions and use the full card for installing Debian. It is recommended to use the 'guided partitioning' option in the installer to create a proper partition layout on the SD card."
Given that these images purely contain the installer, you'll definitely need an internet connection for it to retrieve the rest of the packages and install a full system. I also believe these don't contain any non-free firmware, so you may need to install over ethernet and then add the non-free repo and install any required firmware afterwards. I'm very interested to see what's currently functional and if there's any unexpected snags or hangups, and I'll definitely update this post with what I figure out after receiving my Pinebook Pro and trying to install this image on it! :)