Hi All,I'm just going to point out that there exists another way to boot into the UI installer on RPi3, and perform an ARM64 Debian install in a manner that is very close to what a user would perform on an x86 PC.
This is accomplished through the use of the official UEFI firmware that now exists for the RPi3 [1], which greatly simplifies things and ensures that you can get niceties such as a full UI GRUB on boot (where you can edit boot options for instance) and other features that you'd expect to find on a PC-like install.
Full installation of Debian 10 is actually documented in the official EDK2 firmware repository [2] and you can find a ready to use UEFI binary archive (that also includes the WLAN firmware binaries for use with Linux) at [3].
The only gotchas that exist at the moment are that:- The CD-ROM mount scripts have not been designed for FAT partition usage on MMC (they don't look for install media on /dev/mmcblk# as they do for /dev/sd# for instance, and they also appear to force the file system type to read-only mount, which is a bit problematic) - The installer partition manager is very picky with regards to what it considers an ESP, whereas Raspberry Pi's can't use GPT partition scheme or type 0xef with MBR due to the SoC's embedded bootloader limitations, which may require a post-install fix if you don't create the ESP in a manner that partition manager can be happy with.
Apart from that however, the installation process is fairly straightforward and does provide a user experience that is almost identical to the one you would see when installing Debian on a UEFI x86 PC.
So I just wanted to mention that the method being exposed below is not the only one that currently exists to get to a fully working Debian 10 installer on the Raspberry Pi 3.
If you are interested in the UEFI installation method, you can also additional walkthroughs at [4] (which is probably the most complete) and [5].
Regards, /PetePS: There is work currently going on to bring an UEFI firmware to the RPI4, so that hopefully the same process can eventually be applied there too.
[1] https://github.com/tianocore/edk2-platforms/tree/master/Platform/RaspberryPi/RPi3 [2] https://github.com/tianocore/edk2-platforms/blob/master/Platform/RaspberryPi/RPi3/Systems.md
[3] https://github.com/pbatard/RPi3/releases[4] https://pete.akeo.ie/2019/07/installing-debian-arm64-on-raspberry-pi.html [5] https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=50&t=249449&sid=e7e3dcb4c42da263bdbe1c9661f21e61#p1523007
On 2019.11.05 05:20, Gunnar Wolf wrote:
basti dijo [Thu, Oct 31, 2019 at 09:58:11PM +0100]:Hello Mailinglist, Hello Gunnar,Hi, and thanks for the explicit mention :-]I get the debian installer running on my rpi3. This post is just to inform about the general possibility and for documentation propose on debian wiki.OK, this is quite exciting news! It's great to see the Raspberries being closer to a first-tier architecture in Debian. TBH, I believe for almost all RPi users it will be easier to use the installed images — But yes, I can perfectly understand many will feel this to be better and more official. Given you already did all this legwork... Could you add this information to the Wiki yourself? It's always better if the person that did the work and has the hands-on knowledge does it.test with arm64 mode on rpi3b+ you need: - sdcard with binary blob vfat partition (I use it from https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPiImages) - usb stick for arm64 installer todo: - download arm64-netinstall iso - copy iso to usb stick (cp debian-10.1.0-arm64-netinst.iso /dev/sdx) - copy vmlinuz and initrd.gz from stick to sdcard - edit config.txt to boot vmlinuz and initrd.gz - insert sdcard and usb stick to raspi and startUmh, this looks like quite a bit of "legwork". I understand you are basically proving it is _possible_ to boot into d-i, but this all should probably be prepared into a first-blob bit of a hybrid image: https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/arm64/ch04s03.en.html- ignore missing firmware, brcmfmac43455-sdio.bin is wlan, can be installed later (firmware-brcm80211)AIUI, you can also drop this file in your USB drive and have it picked up by the installer.toto: - not all languages are shown correctly in installerThis seems quite odd... Thanks a lot!