Is it possible to use Armbian on an SD card to boot to another OS on an SSD?

[Folaht Pjehrsohmehj]

I like Guix system. 

I really like it on my desktop, 

so now I want to use Guix system as the OS for my Orange Pi 5 Pro as well.  

 

The problem is, the Arm distro for Guix System is only available for Generic EFI 

and I didn't have the money to buy a Orange Pi 6 Plus.  

 

But I figure, why not install Armbian on SD card and have it boot Guix System on the SSD?

Is that possible and if so, how would I achieve that?  

 

So far I've been able to 'dd' the guix system install ISO onto the SSD.  

It seems to have an iso9660 filesystem.  

Edited 23 hours ago by Folaht Pjehrsohmehj

[bedna]

Maybe I am misunderstanding your question but:

Armbian is one operating system, and Guix system is another operating system, so no.

It's the equivalent of asking "can I install debian but boot NixOS from debian on another storage device".

Unless it's a virtual machine you are talking about, you might be able to run a Guix system as a virtual machine in armian, but I don't think that is what you are asking.

 

If you want to run Guix system, you need to boot Guix system.

 

If it's just the package manager Guix you are talking about, then afaik also no (if you are talking about the guile scheme), for that to work you need to run Guix system, just like you need to use NixOS to run nix package manager. But I could be incorrect.

Edited 19 hours ago by bedna

[tparys]

It may be possible. But due to limited resources, forum support is limited to using Armbian as-is. Everything else goes in Off Topic.

 

If you're truly interested, you could attempt to take the Armbian bootloader, kernel, and device tree, and drop that into a Guix install.

 

But at that point, you are very much on your own.

[Folaht Pjehrsohmehj]

@bedna

 

Yeah, that's exactly what I was asking.  

I found out how to install armbian on the NVMe, which is simply to run armbian install and it does it automatically for you.  

 

I don't see why that would be impossible if one can boot Armbian with Armbian.  

Is the '/boot' section that much geared to a distro?  

I thought that was just the linux kernel part.  

 

I also get the feeling that I would probably not need Armbian at all, but u-boot installed on the SD card,  

but that installing Armbian was at least a good start to see if everything was working 

and what the guix system ARM iso file is an iso9660 filesystem meant for a USB device, 

meaning that that I would need a pure u-boot installed on the SD card to first boot the USB device 

run the guix system installer and then have u-boot boot the NVMe device.  

 

I say 'pure u-boot' because I sometimes see these u-boot.img files floating around on the web  

and just assume these might be the thing that I'm looking for.  

I have no idea really.  

 

Edited 2 hours ago by Folaht Pjehrsohmehj

[eselarm]

1 hour ago, Folaht Pjehrsohmehj said:

I say 'pure u-boot' because I sometimes see these u-boot.img files floating around on the web  

and just assume these might be the thing that I'm looking for.  

I have no idea really.

Armbian is I think the easiest way to get Linux running on many many SBC's, but it is already pre-installed. So just 1 OS 1 boot method. If you want more , it is all DIY. Same as if you buy a a Windows laptop and want Linux on it essentially. Or just a DIY build PC where you put Linux on. You will need to understand disks, partitions, BIOS settings etc. But as you say Armbian is a good start as it is Linux so all can be done. An Armbian image for the RK35xx based SBC also contains the proper U-Boot, it is just that that U-Boot uses boot.scr as primary boot method. So if you remove or rename that file, it tries other methods, like extlinux and also as you need, EFI. But it needs to find a partition of type 0xEF00 and just FAT formatted with /EFI/boot/bootaa64.efi on it (or maybe Ext4 also works, at least it does not for computers with UEFI BIOS, those can only read FAT). 

 

What you can do to test is to move/delete/rename boot.scr in the rootfs of the Armbian install on the SD-card and then have/put a Armbian UEFI for Aarch64 on NVME/SSD/USB-stick. Or just hide/delete all partitions on the SD-card, then it is essentially only a storage place for U-Boot, same as EEPROM/SPI-NOR-flash on SBC's that have such a chip. Of course you can also go straight to Guix installing yourself, from iso9660 tha tyou put on CD-ROM or USB-stick.

 

But advice is to have a serial console cable connected as U-Boot normally does not initialize HDMI, so don't come here and report 'black screen it does not work'.