support for pinebook pro

[zero-pytagoras]

are there any plans to support pinebook pro ?

[diederikdehaas]

What would be the added value? Plebian (currently) is pure Debian with a custom u-boot as that's (still) not upstreamed and therefor there isn't support for u-boot for rk356x devices in Debian.
But all the components needed for the Pinebook Pro are already in (pure) Debian.

[zero-pytagoras]

added value would be standardizing plebian as an image to all pine64 boards, in my opinion only.
wait - rk3399 is the chip in pinebook pro, which means it should work, right ?

[diederikdehaas]

Pinebook Pro is indeed rk3399, which should (also) be supported by the Debian kernel.
But the various images provided here, differ (only) in the u-boot 'package' and neither should work on Pinebook Pro as that needs a rk3399 based u-boot (which Debian does have).

As for providing images for all pine64 boards, I'll leave that up to @CounterPillow

[CounterPillow]

pbp is indeed already supported by Debian's installer; you just need to leave some space during partitioning for u-boot to install itself (instead of choosing to just use the whole device and autopartition)

I see two potential "benefits" of having a Plebian image for RK3399 devices from a user's perspective:

• Same "no installer" experience, allowing people to get up and running quickly
• device tree overlay support by forcing it on in the u-boot build and shipping a device tree package with symbols

The disadvantages I see for a user are the following:

• No installer means manual setup for some things, like renaming the user etc.
• Some software choices already made for the user (networkmanager for example)
• u-boot isn't part of a package

Both sides move the needle veeeery marginally here, I think overall it's not worth the effort for now to spin up a separate debos recipe for RK3399 devices when Debian officially already has an installer.

I'll file this one under "maybe". I'd definitely get started with a ROCKPro64 image first though, since I actually own that.

[zero-pytagoras]

• No installer means manual setup for some things, like renaming the user etc.

you can create setup script (can copy from armbian) to automate firstboot setup.

Some software choices already made for the user (networkmanager for example)

we can have poll with options for people to suggest what they would like to have

u-boot isn't part of a package

I can setup, with some guidance.