desktopify VS imagebuilder

Note: I have no experience with ARM servers (only some play using raspberry pi's) , but if it was me I'd likely explore desktopify if you're wanting a Ubuntu system (including flavors of Ubuntu)

The easiest method however is just install using an existing system (eg. server), then run desktopify which was written/intended for raspberry pi's, but is pretty easy to adapt to other arm64 systems if you're not using a r.pi. but other arm64 system.

I tried Manjaro for 64 bit setup. Initially could not figure out how to force resolution of a 4K tv to HD, so changing resolution on Desktop would not scale well. Went with Ubuntu server and used desktopify. Had to research about how to avoid tv setting certain resolution at boot. May be I will give Manjaro another try. Not sure about Arch though. I have bluetooth mouse and keyboard, therefore only way to use any input is by enabling ssh at first boot.

I'd suggest looking up the `desktopify` project created by Martin Wimpress. There is more than just loading `lubuntu-desktop` required for a Pi (at least for 20.10 & 20.04 as I recall; I've never looked at 21.04), and even if you don't use the desktopify script; it contains clues on doing it yourself anyway (for any of the Ubuntu flavors). https://github.com/wimpysworld/desktopify

However, you can install the 20.04 server version and then run a script called desktopify to convert it.

20.10 is the first Ubuntu release to officially support the desktop environment. If the server image doesn't suit your needs by itself, you could install 20.04 server and then use Wimpy's script Desktopify to add the desktop environment.

So after U-Boot 2018.10 is installed, I downloaded the imagebuilder img to see if it would boot. Tried this one : https://github.com/hexdump0815/imagebuilder/releases/download/230218-04/chromebook_nyan-armv7l-bookworm.img.gz. I first tried to use a Micro Center SD card which booted into a black eDP screen via the nyan-big dtb. The nyan-big-fhd and blaze dtbs all showed the boot sequence stuck, either on SD card failing to initialize or voltage being disabled.

The Duet 3 is the same chipset (the Snapdragon 7c Gen 2) as the Duet 3, so I'd expect similar results, using https://github.com/hexdump0815/imagebuilder/blob/main/systems/chromebook_trogdor/readme.md

Since it is U-Boot, it probably needs a U-Boot kernel to boot right? But I wanted to test it out, so I went to imagebuilder and downloaded https://github.com/hexdump0815/imagebuilder/releases/tag/230218-04 for the nyan-big and flashed to a SanDisk SD Card. All right, this image is probably depth charge based. But I get a black screen. Blue power LED comes on and I get black screen. I inserted SD Card and rebooted, still black screen. I remember my Chromebook crashed like half a hour later due to lack of RAM, half a hour after flashing Libreboot successfully, but have not rebooted.