OK, the person who got Debian Stretch running on the Chip (Pablo Rath) has
very kindly written me a list of the step involved in doing so. I've copied
it below (it's on the arm-netbook mailing list as well), but has the caveat
that boot needs to be from USB, not NAND, so if there's only one USB port
exposed that may be an issue. I'd be curious to try myself- although that
will require obtaining a PocketChip first.
Hopefully it's of some help- if not, just ask.
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Necessary steps to install on Chip like I did are at least: 1. You will need
some command line basics.
2. You will need a USB TTL Serial cable (USB to serial converter cables)
providing a connection between USB and serial UART interface to interact with
Debian Installer.
3. You will need sunxi-tools (http://linux-sunxi.org/Sunxi-tools)
4. Compile mainline U-Boot (build target is "CHIP_defconfig")
5. Download hd-media tarball and CD iso (see
https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Allwinner#Installing_from_a_USB_stick)
The wiki still points to testing, but current stable (stretch) works.
6. Prepare the USB-stick like described and leave a large space free (without
a partition)
7. put Chip into fel-mode and connect it with another computer. Use a
"special" version of U-Boot via fel
(http://linux-sunxi.org/FEL/USBBoot#Booting_U-Boot_over_USB) and boot Debian
Installer on USB.
8. Install with Debian Installer
9. boot and see if this bug report is already fixed:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=866521 if not you have to
manually update initramfs
