Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by megous 1213 days ago
The hard way? Copy bootloader from somewhere, partition, extract readymade rootfs, setup bootloader, reboot. Sounds more like the Arch way. :)

The only ARM specific thing here is probably the need to use a DTB.

This just shows that manual Linux installation on random ARM board is not more complex than on x86_64. Perhaps even simpler, since you're just extracting a pre-made rootfs instead of using a package manager during installation.
3 comments
anthomtb 1213 days ago
Right? With that article title you figure the author had written his own bootloader in Typescript then transpiled to Rust, ultimately cross compiling to his Arm64 target from a homebrewed x86 CPU fabricated in his garage.

For real though, what the author did is much harder than downloading and booting an official OS image from Pine. The article also documents all the successful steps and skips any missteps or debugging, making the process look very simple (not a criticism, I thought it was an excellent read). Maybe those missteps took place during previous projects, but suffice to say that you don’t make booting a non-standard image look easy without expending significant effort, at some time.

link
megous 1213 days ago
Writing your own bootloader is an option if you want to play hard level, sure. I did follow that path, at one time https://xnux.eu/p-boot/ for another Pine64 device. ;)

Anyway, I didn't say the things you're criticizing my reply for.

link
m463 1213 days ago
Experts sometimes forget being beginners.
link
megous 1213 days ago
"Hard" is relative, sure. But regular Arch Linux installation is harder than this in a sense, and the author is Arch Linux user on multiple devices already, so not a beginner.

If I go through the article and list arm64 SBC specific pieces, it's just copying the booltloader from the manjaro image for rockpro64 and maybe different names of files in /dev for some block devices.

Even configuring U-Boot is done the same way you do it on regular Arch, if you use extlinux on x86_64, which many do/did.

link
quectophoton 1212 days ago
DTB = Device Tree Blob?

EDIT: Probably yes. I see this term appears in the article.

link