A long winded title to announce that I’ve managed to create a deb file from Visual Studio Code source, and to install it on the Raspberry Pi 4 8GiB running Debian Buster 64-bit compiled for arm64.

The deb file was built on the Jetson Xavier NX board, then copied to a thumb drive, then moved over via the thumb drive over to the Rasbperry Pi and installed from there. So far it’s behaved reasonably well. I’ve learned quite a bit about the build tools that come with the source. I suppose it’s good that I found some of the directions I did on the web, but now that I’ve gone through this whole process a number of times, what I used to start with short circuits what is available in the source tree cloned from GitHub.

I appreciate that I can use the Jetson NX as a build system. I also appreciate that there is a method in the source tree for building the deb file. That to me is super. Now I can keep up with releases, knowing I can target 64-bit ARM binaries for Debian/Ubuntu.

And speaking of Debian, the 64-bit OS running on the Raspberry Pi now identifies itself simply as Debian.

Once I feel comfortable running the full build suite in Visual Studio Code I’ll post a streamlined how-to for ARMv8/aarch64/arm64. Too many labels, frankly.