Home
### Installing Debian 11.0 on an APU4 board ### So I acquired this little APU4 board from the good folks at PC Engines. It is a little board with 4 gigabit interfaces. The intention is to use it as my home router. I've downloaded the Debian 11.0 netinst ISO and have written it onto a USB pendrive. Since there is no graphic chip on this board, I've connected my PC over a RS-232 serial link and launched minicom (settings: 115200, 8N1). The APU4 board happily booted from the USB pendrive and presented the Debian installation screen. Hurray. But the joy didn't last long, because as soon as I tried to move forward, the system presented me with such unwelcoming message: "Undefined video mode number, Press <ENTER> to see video modes available, <SPACE> to continue, or wait 30 sec" After some fiddling around I found out that the solution is to edit the kernel arguments in the first install screen (by pressing TAB) and editing the default arguments: > /install.amd/vmlinuz vga=788 initrd=/install.amd/initrd.gz --- quiet to this: > /install.amd/vmlinuz vga=off initrd=/install.amd/initrd.gz --- quiet console=ttyS0,115200n8 From there, the installation went smoothly, just like on a VGA console. Once the instllation was over, the system was presenting a login screen on the serial port without me having to worry about anything console-related.