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Comment by TekMol | Hacker News Reader

Is there a way to run Debian on the PinePhone?

I don't mean a debian based OS that is maintained by someone else, but something that is maintained by and can be downloaded from Debian?

If it boots and gives me a shell, I would be happy. I don't need a GUI or phone specific software. If I can have a real linux computer in my pocket, that would be great.

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There Mobian which IMO is as close to a supported Debian OS on Pinephonr as you can get. https://mobian-project.org/

Regarding to my question, that means "No", right?

As far as I can see, Mobian is maintained by Matrix.org whom I never heard of before.

The reason I would like to use Debian is that it is maintained by the Debian foundation who have an excellent history of trustworthiness and reliability.

Why can't one install Debian on the PinePhone?

Both the Pinephone and the Pinebook Pro recently received mainline Linux kernel support with version 5.7. Debian recently added support for the Pinebook Pro as well as the RockPro64. They have daily builds available here for most of Pine 64's devices: https://d-i.debian.org/daily-images/arm64/daily/netboot/SD-c.... There's no Pinephone build yet but IMO it's only a matter of time. That being said, "Mobian" is just a DEBOS recipe with some custom software included that a user by the name of A-Wei has been maintaining. You could clone their repo and build it yourself if you'd like, it's super polished! Here's the Mobian repo: https://gitlab.com/mobian1/mobian-recipes

So, ehm, Mobian is just an ARM build of Debian. It literally pulls from the same upstream package archives etc. Also Matrix.org is a well-regarded free software community making an open, privacy first, federated chat software. It's the sort of people you'd want if you care about free software, privacy, openness etc. I am honestly a bit shocked you haven't heard of Matrix.org - they're fairly well know in the community at this point.

Because nobody has done that yet. Go over to debian-devel, talk to the Debian ARM people and the Debian installer people, and you can help bring Debian to the PinePhone.

Actually, mobian does exactly this... That guy isn't THAT interested to spend 5 mins of his time to solve HIS problem.

https://gitlab.com/mobian1/mobian-recipes/-/blob/master/root...

>As far as I can see, Mobian is maintained by Matrix.org whom I never heard of before.

I am not sure who is maintaining Mobian, but it is surely not Matrix. Matrix.org is the website of a chat protocol, where they have a support channel. Here you can see some members https://liberapay.com/mobian

Mobian is nothing to do with Matrix.org.

not directly from the debian project no, you can put a generic ARM64 debian rootfs on it, but you'll need the kernel and u-boot specifically built for it. There is pinephone support in mainline linux but it'll probably 5.8 or 5.9 before you can really use it on the phone.

Comment upthread claims it was merged in 5.7: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23850034

yes the DTB is in 5.7, but if you compare the dtb file merged there and the one in the kernel fork that's being worked on you'll notice that a lot of stuff is not in mainline yet, so those components are left out. For example in 5.7 it doesn't support display yet.

A patch has already been accepted in linux-next for the driver for the display and will be in 5.8, ther are a bunch more components that are missing with a pure mainline kernel.

Debian aarch64 port rootfs + custom kernel. That's how I run Arch Linux ARM on PinePhone.

There's really nothing else that's needed other than the kernel to make any aarch64 distro run on the phone.

There are a lot of choices

https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/PinePhone_Software_Release...

UBPorts, technically it is Ubuntu and not Debian, but Ubuntu is based on Debian. https://ubports.com/

Ubuntu is derived from Debian and UBPorts is derived from Ubuntu, but by the time you get there it doesn't look the same; ex. UBPorts has a read-only root filesystem (https://ubports.com/blog/ubports-blogs-news-1/post/terminal-...)

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