Official Debian support

[brzegorz]

Hi, what's the status with the new official Debian release? Does it work, or is Armbian/Daniel's installer still the best option to get Debian?

[bcnaz]

I did download it late the other night,
I flashed it to a sd card, popped the sd card into my PBP, and it still booted the original installation of mrfixits Debian.

As I said, It was late, so that's as far as I have got for now.... I will try again when I get the chance.

[sepp]

Did try
Works (I have a mainline U-Boot on Emmc) (Manjaro and Armbian ok with that on NVME)
NetInstall does not serial anymore but still needs an USB to Ethernet

After boot it works but as some test showed
no sound
no HDMI via USB-C
and at least for me: Gnome default not working

and if anybody is interested I have a dualboot Armbian and Manjaro that I am willing to share

[Humid Stylus]

I now have a working almost clean Bullseye release installed on my Pinebook Pro.

My starting point was daniel-thompson/pinebook-pro-debian-installer on the eMMC so my system would not boot from SD, I tried a few moves to work around this but failed leaving a borked system. Solution was to remove the eMMC and use a USB to eMMC adapter on another computer (I have the one from the Pinestore), to flash the SD install according to the README located in http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/bulls...rd-images/

After reinstalling the eMMC in the PBP it will boot from eMMC and the installation can be completed from the built-in screen and keyboard. An USB-ethernet dongle is needed as WiFi doesn't work in the install.

Extra care needs to be taken at the partitioning stage as the Guided (without LVM) will overwrite the u-boot and result in a system that will not boot so the Manual option needs to be used. I resized the installer partition (16GB, ext4, use as /). Created a logical partition for swap (5GB), and a logical for /home (ext4, rest of disk). This leaves a blank space before the / partition where u-boot lives, / starts at block 32768.

After install completes it boots in to the newly installed system.

This method does not require a serial console but it is nice to have as it takes several seconds before the screen or powerled comes on.

Wifi
I git cloned https://gitlab.manjaro.org/tsys/pinebook-firmware and copied the contents of the brcm folder to /var/lib/brcm/

Sound
It was possible to get sound working by fiddling with alsamixer but it sounded awful, getting asound.state from https://gitlab.manjaro.org/manjaro-arm/p...ound.state as outlined in https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php?title=...ting_Guide gave very good results.

The system works but I have had a few kernel ops:es that result in the network being lost.

[alpopa]

This matches perfectly with my install. However it has the 5.7 kernel from custom repository (Debian's is 5.10). What output do you get from

uname -r

command?

[alpopa]

Replying to myself:

Just reinstalled Debian Bullseye in 2 different ways:
1. With Debian installer (text mode, no Cyrillic characters, so in English). Installation went to the end, but the system didn't boot (or booted with broken video driver, or booted with broken DP configuration, etc - no graphic output).
2. With Daniel Thompson's installer (https://github.com/daniel-thompson/pineb...-installer). Works well both installation and installed system boots and behaves normally. All hardware I need works out of the box. Kernel is customized (not Debian's) 5.7 compiled specially for Pinebook Pro. As soon as I install arm64 kernel from Debian repository, the system does not have video output.

So I stay with 5.7 Pinebook Pro kernel for now.

[vajak]

I managed to finally get a full blown Debian/unstable running, including Debian kernels 5.10 and 5.14. I have over twenty years of experience with Debian and feel really comfortable with it on the PBP. Very happy with the whole thing because it simply works as expected for my humble purposes. 

I had to take the detour of using Daniel Thompson's excellent pinebook-pro-debian-installer and once it was up and running moved over to the Debian/unstable channels and performed a dist-upgrade. Took lots of trial and error to get the initram modules right for the Debian kernels, but in the end it works fine now.

I am in the last stages of creating a bootable SD card image of a minimal Debian/unstable system for the PineBook Pro using Debian's both 5.10 and 5.14 kernels out of the box. It is mainly designed to serve as a rescue system containing lots of CLI utilities with only basic desktop capabilities. Will upload a publically accessible xz compressed image of it somewhere once complete.

[bcnaz]

I managed to finally get a full blown Debian/unstable running, including Debian kernels 5.10 and 5.14. I have over twenty years of experience with Debian and feel really comfortable with it on the PBP. Very happy with the whole thing because it simply works as expected for my humble purposes. 

I had to take the detour of using Daniel Thompson's excellent pinebook-pro-debian-installer and once it was up and running moved over to the Debian/unstable channels and performed a dist-upgrade. Took lots of trial and error to get the initram modules right for the Debian kernels, but in the end it works fine now.

I am in the last stages of creating a bootable SD card image of a minimal Debian/unstable system for the PineBook Pro using Debian's both 5.10 and 5.14 kernels out of the box. It is mainly designed to serve as a rescue system containing lots of CLI utilities with only basic desktop capabilities. Will upload a publically accessible xz compressed image of it somewhere once complete.

If I install "this"  to my eMMC,  will my PBP keep the ability to boot from a sd card ?

[vajak]

If I install "this"  to my eMMC,  will my PBP keep the ability to boot from a sd card ?

I am pretty sure you'd need to manually restore u-boot if you'd do this. The image contains Mr.Fixit's update scripts in /root in case you'd need them.

The SD card image is now available for download: forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=15031

[Humid Stylus]

This matches perfectly with my install. However it has the 5.7 kernel from custom repository (Debian's is 5.10). What output do you get from

uname -r

command?

The one I had installed then gives:
uname -r = 5.10.0-8-arm64
uname -v = #1 SMP Debian 5.10.46-4 (2021-08-03)

after update today
uname -r = 5.10.0-9-arm64
uname -v = #1 SMP Debain 5.10.70-1 (2021-09-30)

No change for the little testing I did.