Freedombox on an Armbian supported SBC -- possible?

[Faber]

I'm considering buying one of these boards for a small home server running Freedombox, which is a Debian-based distribution which is designed to make it easier to set up a home server for a number of uses, including media, contacts, calendars, XMPP and SIP. Has anyone tried installing either Freedombox or Debian on this board?

[tkaiser]

10 hours ago, Faber said:

Has anyone tried installing either Freedombox or Debian on this board?

https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/QuestionsAndAnswers#Do_I_need_a_single_board_computer_like_Cubietruck_or_Raspberry_PI_to_run_FreedomBox.3F

[Faber]

5 hours ago, tkaiser said:

https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/QuestionsAndAnswers#Do_I_need_a_single_board_computer_like_Cubietruck_or_Raspberry_PI_to_run_FreedomBox.3F

 

Can a moderator please move my and @Faber's post a to a new thread 'Freedombox on an Armbian supported SBC -- possible?' please?

I already knew about that. I was actually wondering if Debian could boot on one of these boards and how stable it is on them. I noticed that there's a Rockchip bootloader in the Debian repository, and I was wondering if that was necessary for Debian to be able to boot on the NanoPi M4.

[hjc]

38 minutes ago, Faber said:

I already knew about that. I was actually wondering if Debian could boot on one of these boards and how stable it is on them. I noticed that there's a Rockchip bootloader in the Debian repository, and I was wondering if that was necessary for Debian to be able to boot on the NanoPi M4. 

Stock Debian can install and boot on Firefly RK3399, however these new RK3399 boards' dts files are not mainlined yet, so it requires kernel/bootloader package modifications, and adding a board entry to flash-install db, or flash-install will fail.

 

BTW: Stock Debian does not contain any of the armbian optimizations, so nothing will be as smooth as armbian runs.

[tkaiser]

3 hours ago, Faber said:

I already knew about that

Great. So you got the 'you can run FreedomBox on any computer that you can install Debian on'. Now you just need to know what Armbian is (Ubuntu or Debian userland with optimized kernel and optimized settings), then as long as you are able to accept running an Armbian Debian flavor is in some way comparable to 'running Debian' you can start. If Armbian is not for you for whatever reason simply wait a few months or years until upstream support for recent/decent ARM hardware arrived in Debian.

 

In case you choose Armbian you need to ensure to freeze kernel and u-boot upgrades since otherwise you use a stable distro on an unstable basis (it seems stuff like this needs to happen from time to time for reasons unknown to me).