04-26-2021, 03:01 AM
Yesterday I successfully did my first installation of vanilla Debian Bullseye with KDE in my rockpro64. The only issue I got was with the partitioning step, so here are my notes about it in case they help someone:
- Follow the instructions from https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php?title=...ial_Debian to write the Debian installer into an SD card and boot with it. You don't need to flash u-boot into the SPI memory as it's contained in that SD card image.
- At the "select target partitioning scheme", do NOT select "use entire disk" as you'll bump into https://bugs.debian.org/987569. You need to keep the 16MB of empty space at the start of the SD card intact, as that's where u-boot resides. I propose that at this step, you remove the SD card, and you use gparted in a PC to delete all partitions and create something like this: MBR, 16MB empty space, single ext4 partition marked with the boot flag (u-boot needs that), optional swap partition.
- Finally I ran `apt install u-boot-menu; u-boot-update` to regenerate /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf with the following. U-boot reads that file, it's the equivalent of grub.cfg:
Code:
## /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf
##
## IMPORTANT WARNING
##
## The configuration of this file is generated automatically.
## Do not edit this file manually, use: u-boot-update
default l0
menu title U-Boot menu
prompt 0
timeout 50
label l0
menu label Debian GNU/Linux bullseye/sid 5.10.0-6-arm64
linux /boot/vmlinuz-5.10.0-6-arm64
initrd /boot/initrd.img-5.10.0-6-arm64
fdtdir /usr/lib/linux-image-5.10.0-6-arm64/
append root=UUID=ad59f7a5-97db-4c9f-b437-0333cdb25cea ro quiet
label l0r
menu label Debian GNU/Linux bullseye/sid 5.10.0-6-arm64 (rescue target)
linux /boot/vmlinuz-5.10.0-6-arm64
initrd /boot/initrd.img-5.10.0-6-arm64
fdtdir /usr/lib/linux-image-5.10.0-6-arm64/
append root=UUID=ad59f7a5-97db-4c9f-b437-0333cdb25cea ro single