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Re: Installing on Radxa Rock Pi 4B using SD-card-images


On 2/11/23 08:01, yxcv@vienna.at wrote:

On Wed, 1 Nov 2023 18:17:24 -0400
 Daniel Gnoutcheff <gnoutchd@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.
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