What to download for PineTab2? #6
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https://www.pine64.org/2023/04/01/march-update-tablet-bonanza/ says "The RK3566 SoC found in the Quartz64 and SOQuartz line of devices has gotten fairly good mainline support in Linux. To showcase this, me (CounterPillow) and diederik banded together to create Plebian, an installer- free Debian image for Quartz devices based on Debian Bookworm, using its unmodified kernel package.". https://plebian.org/flashing/ doesn't mention anything for the PineTab2. What do I need to download to use Plebian on my PineTab2 when I get it? |
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Replies: 2 comments · 17 replies
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Currently, we don't have a PineTab2 image. Two critical PineTab2 related things are missing from mainline right now: the device tree, and the panel driver. This means we'd have to ship a non-Debian kernel again, which we won't do for Bookworm anymore. That means we'll wait for Debian unstable to advance to Trixie before we even look into this, and that's assuming the PineTab2 DTS and panel driver ever get submitted to mainline (if the person who wrote them doesn't do this soon enough, I will once I get my PineTab2). |
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But this is a source of inspiration? Surely the steps used to build the kernel and the config changes to u-boot could also be more or less applied to a create Debian package? |
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Both of these things are trivial. For u-boot, we likely just need to add the device tree and can re-use whatever config is used on the Quartz64, i.e. the downstream u-boot config is virtually useless for us as it's further from Plebian's needs than the Plebian quartz configs are for the pinetab2. For building the kernel, we just use the kernel fork, Debian's kernel config, enable the panel driver and run make bindeb-pkg to make a .deb. |
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👍 1
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Upstream u-boot apparently works on the PT2: https://gist.github.com/Kwiboo/dfcbdf8fb1eca6115629a79ac9213c21. I got my PT2 today. Looking forward to running Debian on it! |
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@CounterPillow have you received your unit? I see you're actually in Switzerland, as I am, and I have mine. Is there anything I can do to help get Debian running on it? |
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Yeah I've received my unit, I plan to make an experimental image this week. |
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🎉 1
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Here's the repo for my PineTab2 images pipeline. You can grab the resulting image from the Actions run. Please heed the warning(s) in the README, these are essentially unsupported images until Debian Trixie comes around and the kernel stuff is mainlined. https://github.com/Plebian-Linux/pinetab2-images |
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I followed those steps, but the device still won't boot. Here is the debug log:
Does it require an Ethernet connection to boot? (I don't suppose USB tethering would work?)
That should be today then, right?
Ok, that makes sense! |
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It doesn't (or rather, shouldn't?) need ethernet to boot. What happens if you type "boot" into that serial prompt? |
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Then it boots into an initramfs shell. The keyboard backlight turns on, but there's still nothing on the screen. Log:
Edit: it was the SD card. with another SD card, and instructions posted above, the image boots! |
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Looks like it's struggling to read the root file system off the SD card for whatever reason. If you can, try a different SD card. |
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Okay it's possible that the hardware doesn't actually do SDR104 despite the DTS claiming this, so we might need to drop the speed to SDR50 in the device tree, I'll discuss this with the person who wrote the DT. |
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Here's the repo for my PineTab2 images pipeline. You can grab the resulting image from the Actions run. Please heed the warning(s) in the README, these are essentially unsupported images until Debian Trixie comes around and the kernel stuff is mainlined.
https://github.com/Plebian-Linux/pinetab2-images