An unofficial Debian Installer for Pinebook Pro

[xmixahlx]

interesting...

I refer to: https://wiki.debian.org/SourcesList for any of these types of questions.

[danielt]

Really cool to see people making interesting mods for the installer. As far as I am concerned that's what it is there for (i.e. why I didn't just release an SD card image).

To be honest I was very on-the-fence about buster verus bullseye but eventually opted for bullseye to allow people to experiment with panfrost. However if I want to workaround something that makes panfrost unstable I tend to add modprobe.blacklist=panfrost to the kernel command line. I'd also note that software acceleration isn't nearly as bad as you might think... when I first got it working I didn't get the panfrost config right and it fell back to s/ware... it took me a week to notice ;-) ,

Anyhow as ever pull requests for DISTRO=buster/bullseye/sid support are both welcome and encouraged.

[e-minguez]

Really cool to see people making interesting mods for the installer. As far as I am concerned that's what it is there for (i.e. why I didn't just release an SD card image).

To be honest I was very on-the-fence about buster verus bullseye but eventually opted for bullseye to allow people to experiment with panfrost. However if I want to workaround something that makes panfrost unstable I tend to add modprobe.blacklist=panfrost to the kernel command line. I'd also note that software acceleration isn't nearly as bad as you might think... when I first got it working I didn't get the panfrost config right and it fell back to s/ware... it took me a week to notice ;-) ,

Anyhow as ever pull requests for DISTRO=buster/bullseye/sid support are both welcome and encouraged.

With regards hw acceleration, I believe it would be nice a guide/howto on how to check if hardware acceleration is enabled in Debian and how to enable it if it is not.

Also I've seen a tendency on compiling mesa from git which makes me worry about the updates and such. Wouldn't be better to use sid/experimental packages instead? Or even better, create a debian package with the mesa git repo?

[moonwalkers]

I can't seem to find the thread around here I've seen about double and triple finger taps not detecting reliably, with someone recommending to increase the distance between the fingers. Well, looks like it doesn't have anything to do with the finger distance, but instead with the default settings for tap detection max time - looks like by default it is configured to 180ms, and increasing it to 250ms made double and triple finger tap detection pretty much almost 100% reliable.

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P.S.: has anybody braved the linux-image-5.5.0-rc5-arm64 kernel from Debian Experimental?

[danielt]

With regards hw acceleration, I believe it would be nice a guide/howto on how to check if hardware acceleration is enabled in Debian and how to enable it if it is not.

Also I've seen a tendency on compiling mesa from git which makes me worry about the updates and such. Wouldn't be better to use sid/experimental packages instead? Or even better, create a debian package with the mesa git repo?

Checking which renderer is in use is as simple as: glxinfo | grep 'OpenGL renderer' (this works even when you are running under wayland since the embedded X server for legacy apps will still pick up the right strings).

[xmixahlx]

there are now mesa-git packages in debian experimental, which you could install via apt pinning. however if you aren't on unstable already this will probably break more things then fix.

security issues can be resolved by... rerunning the mesa-git script. with ccache this takes just a few minutes...

usage will just boil down to how comfortable you are with git-based /usr/local installs.

I will post kernel install scripts shortly. 5.5-rc7+panfrost-fixes is working nicely!

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no kernel in debian proper will work correctly until tsys' patches are merged upstream.

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

This continues to be a rewarding and interesting thread. @danielt thanks for your helpful and enlightened senior participation. It's just the right balance of enablement and cautions that go a long way, in fostering a community such as this.

[e-minguez]

've observed some issues with my FDE system when there are times that the boot hangs waiting for the device (see attached). To fix it I just cycle power it off and on a few times until it works. Am I the only one? It can be a hardware issue?

https://pasteboard.co/ISow5Qc.jpg

[PineFan]

Really cool to see people making interesting mods for the installer. As far as I am concerned that's what it is there for (i.e. why I didn't just release an SD card image).

To be honest I was very on-the-fence about buster verus bullseye but eventually opted for bullseye to allow people to experiment with panfrost. However if I want to workaround something that makes panfrost unstable I tend to add modprobe.blacklist=panfrost to the kernel command line. I'd also note that software acceleration isn't nearly as bad as you might think... when I first got it working I didn't get the panfrost config right and it fell back to s/ware... it took me a week to notice ;-) ,

Anyhow as ever pull requests for DISTRO=buster/bullseye/sid support are both welcome and encouraged.

Thanks very much, Danielt for your installer, support of the community and sharing your insights and experiences.  Its great to have Debian options and to keep moving the PBP project along .  Much appreciated!

[Der Geist der Maschine]

Memory filesystem


If I recall correctly, Manjaro sets up several memory filesystems. Any thoughts on introducing memory filesystems for /tmp and friends on our Debian builds?

The plus: Less flash wear.

The minus: on a memory constrained system such as the Pinebook Pro (and in particular in combination with 64bit binaries) this might result in more paging.


Note: When I was running Manjaro for some time, emacs's cscope mode was requesting more space in /tmp than what was configured. So, with a conservative /tmp size, we may run into problems from time to time.