On 2/11/23 08:01, y...@vienna.at wrote:
On Wed, 1 Nov 2023 18:17:24 -0400
Daniel Gnoutcheff <gnout...@softwarefreedom.org> wrote:
I have a Radxa Rock Pi 4B (an arm64 single-board computer) with a
(removable) eMMC module. I'd like to install Debian stable on it,
and would strongly prefer to use official Debian binaries and images.
I successfully booted debian-installer from eMMC after flashing the
rock-pi-4-rk3999 SD card image from [1] (using an eMMC-to-microSD
adapter and following the instructions in
README.concatenateable_images). However, I can't find much
information on how to use the installer on this board once it's
started. The Installation Manual [2] doesn't discuss the
concatenateable images at all and says only that non-UEFI boards
might need certain unspecified shell commands after install to make
them bootable.
I tried installing to the eMMC module that the installer itself
booted from (using guided full-disk partitioning with LVM) with the
hope that this would at least preserve/re-use the copy of u-boot
already there. (IIRC this worked for me on other SBCs, but I may have
been using a different partitioning mode.) The install finished and
I rebooted when prompted, but I got nothing -- no response to pings
and no HDMI output, not even from u-boot. Same story after a hard
power-cycle. I guess u-boot got clobbered after all?
Anybody here know how these installers were meant to be used? Has
this been documented anywhere?
Thanks,
Daniel G.
[1]
https://deb.debian.org/debian/dists/bookworm/main/installer-arm64/current/images/netboot/SD-card-images/
[2] https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/arm64/
Why not try ARMbian?
The processor on the OP board is an RK3399 which is well supported in
Armbian. Though there may be nuances of addons to the board that cause
minor issues.
The issue with using Debian on the OP board is that the manufacturer has
issued a modified version of Debian specific to that board and that uses
sometimes quite complex file overlays as well as modified libraries that
can't participate in regular Debian package upgrades.
The best answer is if the board has been supported for a while by
Armbian then that is probably a better choice than a less well
supported/documented manufacturer specific build of Debian.
