Having used Debian on an ARM development board, the issue is handled by "you supply the kernel, we'll supply the rest." On most ARM systems there's a robust fir

Having used Debian on an ARM development board, the issue is handled by "you supply the kernel, we'll supply the rest." On most ARM systems there's a robust firmware that allows you to load a kernel from just about anywhere. For my system, I used multistrap to create a very basic Debian installation. I then TFTP over a kernel and boot using the minimal installation as an NFS rootfs. Once, I got everything to a decent state, all I had to do was copy over the rootfs to a local ubifs flash filesystem and tweak the boot params to boot from the new ubifs root.