Debian (or ubuntu) on a micro sd card (pinebook pro)

[xmixahlx]

you may want to see pbp-tools for additional hardware support on debian and newer kernels, etc.

it's also extremely easy to use debian sid instead of bullseye -- this is my personal preference.

[pine76]

you may want to see pbp-tools for additional hardware support on debian and newer kernels, etc.

it's also extremely easy to use debian sid instead of bullseye -- this is my personal preference.

Thank you for response. I have been seeking a solution to the problems and have decided to wait and hope for one of the updates fix the situation. I have been hearing positive news about kernel 5.8, and was hoping that update would fix. Oddly, it doesn't seem to be in testing or even in sid. The kernel I am using with Debian Bullseye is:

5.5.0.1-pinebookpro-arm64

I will have a look at the pbp-tools. My biggest concern is my sound-card/speakers. Which script can resolve the issue? Also, how do I use the pbp-tools in general?

I have been reading about testing may not be the best bet to use daily. In the past, I had testing breaking after updates; so, I am doing only apt-upgrade to avoid it as much as possible (I have 4 packages kept back and I am not doing dist-upgrade as I suspect it can break testing). There is information on debian wiki about how to use testing below:

https://wiki.debian.org/DebianTesting


I am particularly interested in trying apt-pinning testing with sid. My problem is I am not sure which numbers to choose (between 990 to 500). Do you have any experience in pinning sid on testing?

I would normally prefer a stable operating system that just gets out of my way in my workflow. But I understand it won't happen for the time being; so, either testing or sid I will do, whichever gives me less headache. Would you recommend switching to sid completely instead of pinning?

Fedora gave me a better experience out of the box; however, fedora is heavier than debian in my experience (even with debian gnome, debian seems to be about 8% lighter in resources than fedora workstation). I am still tempting to switch to fedora as I very much liked their implementation; particularly fedora 33 will bring additional polish like btrfs file system by default. I am waiting to see if I want to switch fedora. For now, I am staying with Debian.

[moonwalkers]

I've been running Debian Sid as my main daily driver for the past... Oh, something like 8-10 years? But I do have multiple computers, and some of them are running Debian testing or even stable, so I have something to fall back on if something breaks on my main machine that takes me more than 5 minutes to fix (which is extremely rare).

[pine76]

I've been running Debian Sid as my main daily driver for the past... Oh, something like 8-10 years? But I do have multiple computers, and some of them are running Debian testing or even stable, so I have something to fall back on if something breaks on my main machine that takes me more than 5 minutes to fix (which is extremely rare).

Oh ok, thank you for sharing. Debian wiki also states something similar: the sid would be better to use for work instead of testing. The wiki also warns that testing may have security problems due to slowness of the packages being available in testing repositories; that is the reason they recommend pinning. But from what I see pinning requires some trial and error to make those priority numbers (990 to 500) work, which I don't have the time to invest on for now.

I guess based on your encouragement and what I am reading. Completely switching to sid can be a good idea. I will also need to experiment with pbp-tools as I don't see any documentation on it. 

I was considering to set up apt pinning but it would be a better idea to switch sid perhaps. One thing I don't like is the frequency of updates with sid, but I guess I can live with it for a while, provided I get a reasonable stability.

[xmixahlx]

review the pbp-tools repo. all your answers are in there. build a 5.8.2 kernel with bulseye/sid/scud, pinning, etc.

especially see the resources/apt and linux/5.8 folders, and review the install and config shell scripts that are of interest.

[bcnaz]

It would sure be NICE if a forum member that is handy with the software Prep, could prepare a recent version of the

Debian operating system that we can install to the eMMC and "keep the sd card boot priority".

And Place that in the wiki with the other 'Ready to use' Operating systems. ?

[pine76]

review the pbp-tools repo. all your answers are in there. build a 5.8.2 kernel with bulseye/sid/scud, pinning, etc.

especially see the resources/apt and linux/5.8 folders, and review the install and config shell scripts that are of interest.

Ok, I will review the ressources. I have not patched kernel before; so, I will hopefully manage.

[pine76]

review the pbp-tools repo. all your answers are in there. build a 5.8.2 kernel with bulseye/sid/scud, pinning, etc.

especially see the resources/apt and linux/5.8 folders, and review the install and config shell scripts that are of interest.

UPDATE: I have switched to Sid by issuing the script DEBRELEASE=sid ./pkg-config-apt; rebooted and I seemed to be good to go.

Then, I started the linux build process with LINUXREL=5.8 LINUXPATCH=5.8.2 ./pkg-install-linux; this gave an error on bison and flex. Then, I issued

$ sudo apt build-dep linux
$ LINUXREL=5.8 LINUXPATCH=5.8.2 ./pkg-install-linux

it stopped with a compile time error. My system became unusable with read errors; I decided to reboot. My system is broken now, it is giving me boot errors. What did I do wrong? I would not mind giving this another try if I could get some help.

There are a few other issues during the procedure above. First, the apt gave gpg signature errors for deb-multimedia repository. Should I have disabled it? Second is the kernel; was i supposed to addpatches or the command is good enough for a reasonably working system?

Any help is appreciated.

[moonwalkers]

Oh ok, thank you for sharing. Debian wiki also states something similar: the sid would be better to use for work instead of testing. The wiki also warns that testing may have security problems due to slowness of the packages being available in testing repositories; that is the reason they recommend pinning. But from what I see pinning requires some trial and error to make those priority numbers (990 to 500) work, which I don't have the time to invest on for now.

I guess based on your encouragement and what I am reading. Completely switching to sid can be a good idea. I will also need to experiment with pbp-tools as I don't see any documentation on it. 

I was considering to set up apt pinning but it would be a better idea to switch sid perhaps. One thing I don't like is the frequency of updates with sid, but I guess I can live with it for a while, provided I get a reasonable stability.

If you do not consider yourself a Linux power user - do be ready to learn, a lot, if you switch to full-on Sid. And I would recommend to make sure you have at least one machine that you can always fall back to if your Sid system does end up breaking and you don't know how to fix it.

As to priority numbers - 500 is what the packages from most archives are set to. IIRC 1 is the priority for packages from experimental. Negative priority means package(s) will not be considered at all, priority higher than 1000 means the package will be considered even higher priority than newer versions. If you want to stay on Testing but have some packages updates from Sid then perhaps the simplest approach is to set overall priority to Sid archives at 1 (like the default for Experimental) and then set select packages priority to 500. Alternative option - configure testing as default repo, IIRC that'll assign it priority 900 and will make Testing versions preferred to Sid versions.

---

It would sure be NICE if a forum member that is handy with the software Prep,  could prepare a recent version of the

Debian operating system that we can install to the eMMC and "keep the sd card boot priority". 

And Place that in the wiki with the other 'Ready to use'  Operating systems.  ?

I simply have installed Debian on my microSD the same way I did for eMMC, except the one on microSD I keep very basic (no GUI whatsoever) and Stable, while eMMC is where I go hog wild on Sid with Experimental bits.

[pine76]

Oh ok, thank you for sharing. Debian wiki also states something similar: the sid would be better to use for work instead of testing. The wiki also warns that testing may have security problems due to slowness of the packages being available in testing repositories; that is the reason they recommend pinning. But from what I see pinning requires some trial and error to make those priority numbers (990 to 500) work, which I don't have the time to invest on for now.

I guess based on your encouragement and what I am reading. Completely switching to sid can be a good idea. I will also need to experiment with pbp-tools as I don't see any documentation on it. 

I was considering to set up apt pinning but it would be a better idea to switch sid perhaps. One thing I don't like is the frequency of updates with sid, but I guess I can live with it for a while, provided I get a reasonable stability.

If you do not consider yourself a Linux power user - do be ready to learn, a lot, if you switch to full-on Sid. And I would recommend to make sure you have at least one machine that you can always fall back to if your Sid system does end up breaking and you don't know how to fix it.

As to priority numbers - 500 is what the packages from most archives are set to. IIRC 1 is the priority for packages from experimental. Negative priority means package(s) will not be considered at all, priority higher than 1000 means the package will be considered even higher priority than newer versions. If you want to stay on Testing but have some packages updates from Sid then perhaps the simplest approach is to set overall priority to Sid archives at 1 (like the default for Experimental) and then set select packages priority to 500. Alternative option - configure testing as default repo, IIRC that'll assign it priority 900 and will make Testing versions preferred to Sid versions.

---

It would sure be NICE if a forum member that is handy with the software Prep,  could prepare a recent version of the

Debian operating system that we can install to the eMMC and "keep the sd card boot priority". 

And Place that in the wiki with the other 'Ready to use'  Operating systems.  ?

I simply have installed Debian on my microSD the same way I did for eMMC, except the one on microSD I keep very basic (no GUI whatsoever) and Stable, while eMMC is where I go hog wild on Sid with Experimental bits.

No, I don't consider myself as a linux power user; I haven't compiled my kernel to optimize my laptop, or considered other things like connecting over ssh or checking out the forensic tools etc.

I prefer to choose an OS that stay out of my way during my workfow; an OS which gives me minimal effort for maintenance so I can concentrate on my own work. I do research and I am self-learning mathematics, my experience with linux is mostly relevant to that area plus some light to medium linux administration. Some of the software that I use, e.g. emacs, latex, have steep learning curves. So, I prefer to learn them instead of learning linux to be a power user.

After crushing my Bullseye system from compiling the kernel, I ended up switching to Fedora again to see if I can go with it. Fedora 32 Workstation rendered unusable for me after the updates; it is very heavy, using gnome tracker agressively, it has services like ABRT that disturbs you often etc. I ended up switching to Sway wm instead of gnome and it seems to be a good decision. I don't prefer wms normally due to similar reasoning of requiring some maintenance time. Sway took me one and a half day to set it up at a usable level, i.e. sway+waybar config. But it is very usable and seems to be an environment where I can concentrate on my own work. So, I am satisfied with it.

That said, I don't consider staying with Fedora and I will switch to Debian. I need to get used to what is available on the pbp-tools repo for that; I need to learn more, e.g. practice compiling my own kernel as I don't see kernel 5.8+ hitting Debian repositories anytime soon.

I am open to learning, I am considering concentrate more on using emacs as my goto program as it has quite a bit of abilities including being an email client and a web browser, emacs can work nicely with sway wm. On the downside emacs does not seem to do well with Sway due to not being a native wayland application to my understanding. 

I have another laptop with kubuntu installed. It was debian stable with that one, but it crashed from a kernel update. I ended up installing kubuntu (I don't prefer ubuntu). I also have another micro sd, which could give me an opportunity to play with debian and pbp-tools.