On 2021.02.19 13:37, Diederik de Haas wrote:
On vrijdag 19 februari 2021 00:02:27 CET Rick Thomas wrote:Is it possible to install Debian Bullseye on a Raspberry Pi 4 (4GB) from a CD/DVD or USB Flash stick or uSDcard? If so, where would I look for instructions for doing so?https://raspi.debian.net/tested-images/ contains a Bullseye image that is tested on a RPi4 4GB.
Technically, this is not as much installing Debian, which is what OP asked about, but more taking an image that was installed/setup by somebody else, and flat-copying that to your media.
The end result is that you may not have as much flexibility with user setup, partitioning and so on, as you would have with using the formal Debian installer.
And of course, the problem with preinstalled images like these is that distro maintainers need to multiply them for every platform they want to support, which quickly become unmanageable and leaves any user of any platform that hasn't deemed worth supporting stranded...
The established goal of SBBR, which is a bona fide ARM standard that was designed precisely to address this major pain point, is to stop this madness and let the platform developers (rather than the distro maintainers) take care sorting out platform support by:
1. Making sure that the platform has a well established means of booting, through a formal UEFI firmware, which, despite its misgivings, is arguably the most user-friendly way to do so, as it mimics the known PC user experience.
2. Working with mainline kernel to add whatever ACPI drivers are needed to support their platform, which too is arguably better than requiring everyone to use your "custom" version of the kernel.
I can only be hopeful that, since this should aid reduce their workload, and especially avoid the multiplication of custom images for this or that platform, both distro maintainers and contributors will come to realize that a phase shift is happening and that now is the time to start moving away from the old "If you want to run our distro on ARM, then you'll first need to flat-copy this custom image" paradigm...
Regards, /Pete