Hello everyone,
Thanks a lot for all your replies, I wasn't expecting that much
Since the mainline kernel and u-boot now both provide out of the box support for the Cubieboard, it was actually surprisingly easy to install Debian on my hard drive. For future reference, I'll write it here if you don't mind.
This method described in the armhf Debian Installation manual is easy to follow. I used a pre-build SD-card image with the installer, a Debian ISO on a USB stick, and preseeding to get an SSH shell because I couldn't manage to send command on the serial port. I just adapted my locale settings, increased the timeout a bit, and removed everything after the Network console section in the example provided in the Preseeding section of the installation manual. To add the preseed.cfg file to the SD card, I found some nice method:
# gunzip path/to/sd/card/initrd.gz
# echo "preseed.cfg" | cpio -o -H newc -A -F path/to/sd/card/initrd
# gzip path/to/sd/card/initrd
Then I simply needed to ssh into installer@192.168.1.xxx with the password r00tme, and I had access to the debian-installer. I was really surprised by how easy it was, compared to a few years ago. It helps to be able to see what's on the serial port to debug until you get an ssh access though.
Now, as you said tkaiser, it's about settings that matter. I know I could use Armbian because it would do most of the things for me, but I really like to know what's on my server as much as possible. I think this thread lists most of the meaningful things I need to adapt, for the rest I'll look into the changelog list
Please keep up the good work with Armbian, it's a really nice distro (or build system)!
Thanks again for your help.