Trying to get Debian working on the HF:U. What basic packages do I need?

HiFive Unleashed
1

Sorry if this is a super beginner level question. I’m trying to use this guide to get debian running on the unleashed board. I’m at the step where I’m making a multistrap config file, and I’m not exactly sure which packages I should get as the must haves for a somewhat regular debian experience. I know I need apt, gcc, net-tools, and ssh. I feel like there are some necessities I am missing, though. I tried to look up “bare minimum debian packages” and the closest I could find was a list of over 10k stable packages on riscv.

One issue I’m having is I’m not sure where to include these packages in the config file, as well. The guide provides this template. I’m not sure what packages to include under Sid-main, Unstable, and Unreleased.
[General]
arch=riscv64
aptsources=Unstable Unreleased Sid-main
bootstrap=Unstable Unreleased Sid-main

[Sid-main]
source=http://deb.debian.org/debian
suite=unstable
omitdebsrc=true
keyring=debian-archive-keyring
packages=XXX

[Unstable]
source=http://deb.debian.org/debian-ports
suite=unstable
omitdebsrc=true
keyring=debian-ports-archive-keyring
packages=XXX

[Unreleased]
source=http://deb.debian.org/debian-ports
suite=unreleased
omitdebsrc=true
packages=XXX

If anyone has some insight into this, I’d really appreciate it.

2

That looks like an apt config file. You can’t specify packages there. You specify packages when you run apt. debootstrap, and its equivalents, will give you a root file system with most basic packages already installed, including enough to run apt to install more. So you don’t need to specify any packages until after you chroot into the new root file system.

The wiki page you are using is from April 2018. There is updated info in the main RISC-V page
https://wiki.debian.org/RISC-V
which lists 4 different ways to generate the initial root file system, provides a few prebuilt root file systems if you don’t want to build your own, and has a little info about how to use one of the prebuilt images on a HiFive Unleashed board. See the OS / filesystem images section.

2 Likes
3

Oh man this even has an updated config file for multistrap. I did not see that. I’ve used multistrap before but I’ve never had to populate my own config file so I was very confused. Is there a recommended way of doing this right now?

4

RISC-V isn’t a fully supported Debian architecture yet, so getting started is a bit complicated. There isn’t a single standard way to get started, just a lot of different options, all of which require a few manual workarounds. Eventually this will be fixed. But meanwhile just grabbing one of the prebuilt tarballs is probably the easiest way to get started, and then use apt to upgrade to something more recent than the tarball.

We don’t do debian distro development here, so we aren’t the best ones to ask. You could try asking questions on the IRC channel.

5

Gotcha. I will head there. Thanks

6

Hi,
you can refer this below thread to boot debian Os on Hi-Five Unleashed Board