An unofficial Debian Installer for Pinebook Pro

[dumetrulo]

How do I go about configuring WiFi on this minimal setup so I can start adding components?

I believe you will just need the "wpasupplicant" and "network-manager" packages. With those installed, the "nmtui" command is a ... usable way of getting networking set up without a DE.

How do I install them at the time I run the installer?

[Solra Bizna]

After running the installer, mount the root partition, chroot into it, do whatever apt commands you want, exit from the chroot, and unmount the root partition.

Something like this:

Code:

mount /dev/mmcblk1p6 /mnt
chroot /mnt /bin/bash
apt install wpasupplicant network-manager
# (run any other commands you like here)
exit
umount /mnt

(make sure a given command succeeds before moving on to the next one)

[danielt]

After running the installer, mount the root partition, chroot into it, do whatever apt commands you want, exit from the chroot, and unmount the root partition.

Something like this:

Code:

mount /dev/mmcblk1p6 /mnt
chroot /mnt /bin/bash
apt install wpasupplicant network-manager
# (run any other commands you like here)
exit
umount /mnt

(make sure a given command succeeds before moving on to the next one)

There is also use the following to get a chroot shell: ./install-debian do_shell

Above approach is perfectly ok and often it won't make a difference which method you use. However do_shell will mount additional filesystems which allows you to run a wider set of commands to set things up and will also handle encrypted rootfs fairly smoothly.

[dumetrulo]

There is also use the following to get a chroot shell: ./install-debian do_shell

Thank you for this, I will try it out when I can!

Should that info be in the Readme on Github? (Or is it there, and I just overlooked it?)

[moonwalkers]

I have started playing around with this installer, and set up a minimal Bullseye (no tasks) on an SD card.

How do I go about configuring WiFi on this minimal setup so I can start adding components?

Also I noticed that the minimal setup is missing basic things like a shutdown or poweroff command, how can I add these at the time of installation?

Even if you don't select any tasks you should end up with wpasupplicant and network-manager packages already installed. In my installation all I needed to do was run 

Code:

nmcli device wifi connect <SSID> password <password>

to connect to my WiFi network. Run that command with 'sudo' if you want your connection to be system-wide and activated on system start-up as opposed to on user login. It may not get activated automatically anyway, possibly because there may be some extra packages needed - in my experience it didn't get activated automatically on first reboot, but it did get activated automatically on second reboot. If it doesn't get activated automatically after reboot - just run the same command again.

[xmixahlx]

I always do a minimal install (no tasksel options). the above nmcli is my method to connect to network, but I use -a to prompt for password rather than have it in my history.

[moonwalkers]

I always do a minimal install (no tasksel options). the above nmcli is my method to connect to network, but I use -a to prompt for password rather than have it in my history.

Nice tip, I've missed that flag, should've guessed there would be one like that and looked more attentively.

[maya.b]

I've recently spent a little while hacking together a quick 'n dirty Debian installer for the Pinebook Pro.

https://github.com/daniel-thompson/pineb...-installer


It is not a fully fledged installer... just some code that run on the Pinebook Pro itself using an existing Debian (or maybe Ubuntu) distro. It will install an operating system from scratch to an alternative media. Nevertheless it is a "real" installer in that sense that there is no downloadable image, no default password and you get to choose the keyboard layout, locale, timezone and desktop environment for yourself!

It uses upstream Debian packages for everything except the kernel and bootloaders. Actually... on that subject I deserve no credit for the kernel (which is the v5.4 close-to-mainline kernel that @tsys has has been hacking on) or the bootloaders (which are simply the binaries from @Mrfixit2001 's update repo).

So far I have only used it to author SD cards (from a distro running from eMMC) however it has been tested with the eMMC disabled so we can be confident the bootloaders work. That means that, in principle, it is also suitable for installing to eMMC when running from SD card. I've also only tested text mode and the Gnome desktop environment (wayland, panfrost, gnome 3.34).

One interesting feature of this installer is that it is trivial to switch from arm64 (default) and armhf (add ARCH=armhf to the make command line). This allows you to run identical distros with the two different instruction sets... which could make for some interesting benchmarks if someone wants to make them.

Check out the Pine64 wiki for feature status, known issues and workarounds.

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2019-12-14: Partial LUKS rootfs support, automatic kernel updates, enable audio DAC by default, faster boot times.

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2019-12-31: Rewrite as a shell script, automatic unmounting on error, better co-existance of installs to different media on the same machine (e.g. micro SD and eMMC installs).

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2020-01-21: In response to user requests, @e-minguez created a wiki page (above) to share features status, known issues and workarounds. Please contribute and help keep it up to date! Note that if you have a forum login then you already have a wiki login.

You don't happen to have a linux-headers package for the 5.4.2.2-pinebookpro-arm64 kernel by any chance?

[tpm]

You don't happen to have a linux-headers package for the 5.4.2.2-pinebookpro-arm64 kernel by any chance?

There's a linux-headers-5.4.2-2-pinebookpro-arm64 package.

[wasgurd]

Has somebody tried linux-image-5.5.0-rc5-arm64 from experimental?