Gene Heskett wrote:

> The debian version of u-boot is not compatible with the pi's boot loader
> for armhf. �Never has been to my knowledge.
> 
> The one time I tried the netinstall, which installs grub and an arm64
> kernel, it booted nicely but networking was broken.
> 
> Basicly if you want debian on a pi you must use the raspbian flavor, it
> Just Works, with the usual putzing with networking of course if running
> a host file based network which I am.

Debian works perfectly fine. The only problem is the debian kernel. I just
copied the raspbian kernel (+ modules/firmware) and all works fine.
I was going to test newer kernel and did compile one - but did not find the
time to test. So the only thing from raspbian you need is the kernel.

I am not sure about the hosts file. I actually used raspbian only to
debootstrap debian :)