Thank you for this post Ian. Probably the biggest regret for me when Kevin deleted the a10linux VPS was losing the nand boot tutorial I made. Personally, IMHO, I think absolutely nobody should be using MMC for the bootloader. Guillaume's issues with Mele 1.7, and also the people with 1GB+, highlight the problems with the mmc SPL. Those issues should be resolved by using the Allwinner BOOT1 and the nand uboot. Going that route you can still have the Linux rootfs on MMC, and it boots more reliably and with the Android icon to show it's booting. You can use the Nand uboot to boot Android or Linux from any of the suported devices. It also avoids using any dd command. So it should be easier for most users. It is a real shame that Cubie pulled NAND support and failed to inform people of the possiblity of using the NAND uboot. He could have easily done so and the community would be much better off. Now most people are extremely hesistant to use NAND for no good reason.
Quote
As i understand it from Guillaume's post the best way to proceed is to start with Gnexus's multiboot uboot thingy ?
Yes. I don't have time to post a new tutorial right now. But the first step would be to install the new NAND uboot here. Full instructions are in the README. Use it to boot Android and from MMC. If you want to keep Android then on the Mele you can just use the useless 1GB backup partition. It has plenty of room for Debian. Just reformat it as ext4. Otherwise repartition NAND keeping the just the boot and env partitions. On Guillaume's site he deleted the env partition. I don't know how he managed to do that and still was able to save the uboot env. Maybe his env is not saved. . . You must keep env partition.