So… mostly asking for those who have already done some experimenting.
I know the Development Platform comes preloaded with Ubuntu 20.04, but it seems 22.04 already supports Ampere pretty well too. Is there any reason to hold off moving to 22.04?
Also, I saw some Twitter activity around Windows on Ampere—but it looks like to get Windows 11 for ARM you have to jump through some hoops (including building yourself an ISO using something like https://uupdump.net and doing so on a Windows machine already!). I tried downloading a Windows 11 for ARM insider build but that resulted in an ‘Error’ from Microsoft (I am an Insider, though my membership is pretty old at this point, maybe I’m expired?).
Finally, any other Linux distros that are more or less ‘tier 1’ instead of just “it works, but nobody’s really testing it”?
I’m not so sure about your definition, but I get what you mean.
It would be difficult for me to give the definition of Armbian too…
For me, it’s not an OS, it provides OS (Debian and Ubuntu) for SBCs, laptops, thanks to the use of a build script.
So in the end, you have a Ubuntu or Debian image built by Armbian, with a few built-in tools that make my life easier.
So when I say “my device runs Armbian”, I’m wrong, plenty wrong.
But you’re right, it does not make much sense using Armbian on something that would run Debian out of the box, unless Armbian allows you to feel “at home” on any device (which it does for me, even on RISC-V machines).
I don’t own (yet?) a Developer Platform or Dev Kit, so better remove my Armbian fanboy cape and let the grown ups continue discussing valid OS choices for these beautiful machines.
I have nothing against Armbian. It exists to help getting something useful to run on those Shitty Board Craps which are made by vendors who do not care about about getting them supported in mainline U-Boot/kernel/etc.
For me “Debian based rootfs with custom kernel and some extra packages” is not Debian. It is Debian based something, fork, remix, etc.
When I buy Arm hardware (for development) I check how it is supported. When it comes to AArch64 I owned:
Pine A64 2GB (Kickstarter edition, bought as an experiment)
Raspberry/Pi 3 (ordered on announcement day to see how they did things, sold few months later)
Pine RockPro64 (to check how SBC look “nowadays”, helped improving it’s config in mainline u-boot, did some distro testing/enablement)
EspressoBin (bought from friend, used as a router (OpenWRT) for some time)
Honeycomb (got free, paid customs, used as a development/testing box)
Also had APM Mustang (great SBSA/SBBR machine years ago). Now I use Macbook 14" with M1Pro as my development system (running Fedora Asahi Remix). Both machines are work related.
comhpc-docs – I-Pi SMARC is the only list I know of. I believe the Radeon 7900 range should also work, I have not been willing to spend $800 to find out
OSes are an issue for me as well with my Lenovo C630.
Lenovo provides a tool which will allow you to build an Win10 ARM image on a Win10 x86_64 machine. It’s painful, and then eventually I was forcibly upgraded to Win11.
I tried looking for Win11 ARM images, but nothing I found worked. There were a lot of sketchy websites out there, and the official Windows ISO situation leaves a lot to be desired. I mean I would pay for an ISO, but there’s just no reasonable path that works.
Alessandro and the folks over at https://cloudbase.it/ had Win 11 running on Mt Jade (2P 2u) a while back. I could see if they want to drop some advice on this Discourse.
@Aaron do you know who in the engineering team had worked on Windows 10/11 boot?
That would be great! I’ve finally gotten a download of the VMDK from a friend, converted that to .raw format, wrote to NVMe using dd, and… I get the BSOD with an ACPI_BIOS_ERROR
Yeah, that’s the article I found that had the most detail — though his BIOS seems vastly different than the one that ships with the ADLINK system (his BIOS even had settings for how the CPU core distributes workloads).
Then, you can use qemu-img (.exe is available too here qemu-img for WIndows - Cloudbase Solutions) to convert it to a raw file, then you can dd it either via an smb share, an usb stick or even via curl | tar if you have an apache2/nginx around and a live Ubuntu 22.04 running on the box, to the disk of your choice.
These are ballpark instructions, please let me know if you need anything or you have an issue with the above workflow.
