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Booting Debian on my Arndale board



Dear All,

My "Arndale" board finally arrived recently and I have been trying to get it
to do something useful.

It ships with Android in its eMMC and that seems to work OK.  It can also
boot from a micro-SD card and I've successfully booted the Ubuntu image from
here: https://wiki.linaro.org/Boards/Arndale/Setup/EnterpriseUbuntuServer .

I would like to install Debian armhf on the SATA SSD.  I have attempted to
do this by:

On the Ubuntu system:
- Formatting the SSD
- Debootstrapping onto it
- Making some minor changes to /etc files

In U-Boot:
- Changing the kernel command line to set root=/dev/sda1
- Booting using the Linaro Ubuntu kernel

This has worked, and I have got as far as a login prompt, about twice.  But
normally the boot process seems to stop at some random point, maybe when
"Activating swapfile" or "Cleaning up temporary files".  Sometimes it pauses
for a bit, then makes some more progress, then stops more permanently.

One possibility is that the SATA system has problems.  I will probably try
copying the Linaro Ubunutu root image onto the SSD, and/or copy the Debian
root onto the eMMC, in order to check that.

But the fact that I got no SATA problems while debootstrapping makes me
think that that is not the problem.  So my question for this list is: should
I be able to use this Linaro Ubuntu kernel (and their U-Boot) to boot a
Debian armhf system?  Are there any kernel differences between the two that
I should worry about?  This kernel seems to be non-modular, which surprised
me, but ought to make this stuff work more easily.  Is there an "official"
Debian kernel suitable for this board somewhere that I could try instead?

Thanks for any hints!


Phil.


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