On Fri, Nov 03, 2023 at 12:22:36PM -0400, Daniel Gnoutcheff wrote: > > 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. > > Oh, I should clarify. By "official Debian binaries and images" I meant > to say "pure" or "mainline" Debian as distributed from *.debian.org. Yes, a > bespoke "Debian" image from the hardware vendor is, indeed, out of the > question. ARMbian is better, but I know and deeply trust the Debian project > and would prefer to use their releases over those from a derivative like > ARMbian. >
I think you've hit the curse of almost all ARM single board computers. Almost all are small production runs / out of East Asia somewhere as "prototypes"** with a board support package (BSP) that's probably just the manufacturer's kernel, u-boot and dtbs. ** Pine64, I'm looking at you: I have to buy from an EU distributor to get longer than 30 days support. With the caveat of almost no upstream support, Armbian will package the BSP and do their best. The manufacturer may have their "own" Debian remix but you're on your own when it comes to adding "official" Debian packages. The way round this is to build u-boot or reverse-enginer the settings then do the same for a kernel, dtb and then debootstrap Debian yourself - that's exactly the sort of thing that folk do to get their boards "supported in Debian" - folk like vagrantc and gwolf. Painful isn't in it - there's a reason why there are relatively few boards supported in the SD card images list. This is one of the reasons why only some of the BananaPi variants are supported - there's a new variant very regularly and the amount of work needed to get a board supported can be significant. If nobody has that board, it's going to be hard to get support, for example. [That's also why I keep asking Gene whether he's running vanilla Debian or not]. > Thanks, > Daniel G. > Good luck with it all Andy
