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Yes you can work to make things better. But since I don't have this box (nor even one with that specific cpu version) there isn't anything I can really help you with. But anything you find/improve can be submitted back to Armbian as a PR. This stuff is all community supported, thus it depends on people like you to make improvements and submit them back for others to benefit from.

Thanks @JuanEsf

Hi Everyone, I managed to have it booted off the SD card only without FEL fiddling (also because my A-to-A OTG cable was dumb so I've soldered a UART and get on there trying to dodge the hardcoded protected boot on eMMC by playing with u-boot and tricking it with DTB hacks forcing an internal eMMC disable in favor of SD boot.) I've ultra simplified the procedure for mere mortals: 1- Flash Pine64 Armbian image on an SD card 2- Flash the "magic 1st Magabyte" (dd brutally the first meg) 3- Insert the SD card in your Remix Mini 4- Boom The stupid part is that I've done this in a 24 hours rush and kind of tried of backtrack what I did to make it happen... I'm not able to reproduce it but I have all the notes here: https://gist.github.com/penzoiders/582bfab2c9265716dd375fb5e7679bcf if anyone of the deveolpers is interested in this I can ship to the maintainers a couple of units (I have dozens of these used-to-be-ewaste devices). I'll attach the 1M magic boot sector. remix_mini_armbian_first_1m_pine64.bin

@JuanEsf I will try !! Thanks a loot

In the meantime I fiddled with HW crypto and PCIe sleep states. While the former is working on edge and current, the latter may be an individual error with my Samsung PM9b1 128Gb NVME SSD not working in the upper 2230 M.2 on edge. While the current 6.6 kernel does not use ASPM eventually, the edge 6.18 kernel has it and it leads to read errors. Adding pcie_aspm=off to /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf::append helped, but I think adding a "No ASPM" to pci-quirks for this device is a better solution b/c the PCIe wifi is working (has L1 and L0s sleep). So if you like then test your NVME SSDs with the edge kernel. I'am especially interested in NVMEs reporting Capabilities L1 PM Substates with lspci -v LG // Sven-Ola

Hey, thank you very much!! Downloading and testing current (did a dd on an sd card, didn't boot, I'll check it again) But edge... Boots! I have to check it with some more care so I can see how does it work And yes, the guys from Devuan make a good work keeping stuff a bit simpler. I like quite a lot Void Linux (in fact this laptop I'm writing in has it installed) I'll test current with some more care Thank you! current.txt edge.txt

1) Language. Either I expressed myself incorrectly or I was misunderstood, but my communication on this forum will most likely proceed as follows: My message in Russian -> Translator -> My message in English And the same in reverse order. 2) A little information about me. I'm a school student, so I'm unlikely to understand any of the high-tech terms. 3) AI If it helps, here's the most productive thread of conversation with Deepseek: https://chat.deepseek.com/share/20dl6vpqy97gpu4et4 4) DTBO and DTS Thanks to AI, almost every new version of dts had a new name, but they all seemed to compile to dtbo with the same name. I'm thinking of finding one that can produce a gradient, but I haven't succeeded yet, and I haven't tried everything. I don't know what color it should be, but mine was a white-to-black gradient. I'll also attach a Python script for it. I didn't create it separately, but wrote it directly into the SSH console (as far as I understand). 5) Raspberry Pi I have a primary 32 GB SD card, which I've been using since installing Klipper on my 3D printer. I also have a spare 64 GB SD card, which I installed MainsailOS, KlipperScreen, and added printer.cfg to. Initially, when I tried using ready-made libraries, I used the primary card, and even used it for a few attempts with AI. But then I switched to a second (spare) card, so that if I messed up the firmware or made any irreparable changes, I could reinstall the OS, reset it to its original state (as mentioned at the beginning), and then repeat all the necessary operations from the beginning. It's probably best to record all your steps somewhere so that after successfully setting up the screen on the spare card, you can repeat the necessary steps on the main card. Just in case, I'll save the current config.txt and all created dts files on my PC. 6) Display I'm attaching a photo of my display and another from the product page on AliExpress. I already have it soldered into the Raspberry Pi. During my attempts, I soldered from spi1 to spi0 and back maybe five times. But I'm tired of this and want to stick with the current pinout with spi1, since I have two more accelerometers on spi0, which I desoldered while setting up the display. 7) Display nuance During the first connection, I slightly damaged the solder mask of the ground plane near the positive contact of the display with a soldering iron and shorted it out with solder. I thought something on the display was broken, so I desoldered and checked some components (the microcircuit, capacitors, and resistor), but they were intact. It was only later that I discovered the real problem. After solving the problem, I connected the 5-volt power supply, but after a couple of hours, I decided to switch it to 3.3 volts just in case. I can switch it back to 5 volts if necessary. I hope this short-circuit situation didn't affect the operation in any way. If this is helpful, I've attached all the DTS versions I currently have; they can be opened in Notepad++. When I find the one that produces the gradient, I'll edit this post or write a new one. test_display.txt ili9488-debug.dts ili9488-fixed.dtbo ili9488-fixed.dts ili9488-fixed-gpio.dts ili9488-full-init.dts ili9488-priority.dts ili9488-test.dts ili9488-test-18bit.dts ili9488-test-bgr.dts ili9488-test-reg36.dts ili9488-test-rotate.dts ili9488-working.dts ili9488-xpt2046.dts ili9488-64bit.dts ili9488-correct-horizontal.dts

A long time ago, I made an armbian guide, which included adding a kernel patch. Can you try this method? "Move them* to ~/armbian-2023.05/build/userpatches/kernel/archives/sunxi-6.1 (using the scp command or sshfs)" * would mean the cpio file (use diff3 to convert to patch file**) and any linux configuration patches needed to make your initramfs. ** diff3 linux_orig_source_folder linux_source_folder_with_cpio_file https://github.com/robertojguerra/orangepi-zero-full-setup/blob/main/README2.md#73-add-the-tv-encoder-driver-to-the-linux-kernel-source

This unit on Armbian has bigger problems than the Ethernet not coming up. such as: I believe that stems from the current U-Boot being used. If I flash mine and use my DTS that comes up correctly and the ethernet. Sorry but bringing this unit up to snuff would take more time than I'm currently willing to put in right now. If a window opens up in the future, I'll look into it.

So far I only have working ethernet, which is good enough probably. So, hdmi, wifi, audio, gpu are not working. Is there anything I can do to fix any of these? Install some firmware, edit the dtb or something?

Hello @brunorro, I have uploaded two images to https://privat-in.de/ (navigate to downloads, grab Armbian*.img). Simply post findings here. The "edge" image is rather unstable, e.g. my NVME gives a read-error while working fine with "current", while a Mediatek Wifi card seems to work. Probably no easy task, could be anywhere in the IOMMU - DMA - PCIe triangle. The images are compiled from https://github.com/sven-ola/armbian-build/tree/orangepi-rv2 kernel with defaults plus switched on every Mediatek Wifi driver module. Here's my Todo for ref (+ marks ok): To be merged + Boot from SSD (upper+lower) + SPI NOR flash boot / install + SD/TF speed too slow (15mb/s) - Check SD UHS in uboot speed limit + Brcm SDIO wifi not working - Armbian edge: Brcm SDIO Wifi - Armbian edge: PCIe NVME IOErr + Bluetooth not working - RTL ethernet (2.5gbit R2V board?) - Ky overlay dtbo's missing - Focaltech touch driver from Ky? - Ky MIPI/CSI cam modules - What is that realtime r_uart? - GPU? USB2-OTG? USB3? Sound? Personal wishlist: - Device-mapper / dm_era missing + Mediatek PCIe wifi modules - PCIe adapter: Radeon GPU test Ah, yes. OpenWrt is on the Ky list of supported systems. I have a personal history on that too. While getting rid of systemd may be not that difficult (see Devuan) exchanging libc is another beast probably. LG // Sven-Ola

I have a Magicsee N5 Max X4 TV box (Amlogic S905X4). Has anyone tried this with this model? I tried removing the # S905X4_Generic symbol, but it still gives an error when booting. Could you please help me? Thank you!

On https://www.armbian.com/radxa-rock-5-itx/ there are several things wrong. 1 is a desktop image has stated size of 260.1 MB, that is certainly wrong. Then below there are several filenames Armbian_24.11.1_Rock-5-itx* in a sort of test report list. Note sure if that makes sense, more than 1 year old images. Also 6.1.75 vendor kernel had a few issues for me, although other RK3588 SBC. 1 year old versions of images might rely on older non-KMS HDMI init of a HDMI-monitor (done by older U-Boot), while newer U-Boot fails to init HDMI-monitor and also newer kernel and the current KMS might do things in a different way. I have that for my NanoPi-R6C and a certain older Medion HDMI monitor. Sometimes the KDE login screen just pops-up in 640x480. When login, the normal desktop goes correctly to 1080p60 (fullHD). A soft reboot also keeps it then in 1080p60, but the 2026.x versioned U-Boot does not manage to init the HDMI (maybe on-purpose, I have not looked in build config etc). I have not tried restarting displaymanager via ssh as the 640x480 came eventually, but did it several times in the past (from 2019 till 2024 or so until not using it with HDMI anymore) for 2 RPI4, also different monitor and also with or without a HDMI switch in between. A method is to put a video= statement on the kernel commandline with the desired mode. Earlier via RPi firmware in config.txt. I also looked into journal for the NanoPi-R6C issues of course and various failures w.r.t. HDMI after kernel 6.16.x or so, but all not fatal. So in the end it works and now properly working with kernel 6.18.2 edge kernel (Armbian Trixie KDE6). I went back to other bootloader (EDK2-UEFI v1.1) as that manages to init the HDMI monitor before kernel load and that is what I need, else always other computer needed (serial console) to select a different kernel or kernel config. I have never used video= statement with Armbian (yet), maybe I'll try just to know if and how it could work. So @Bobbox, can you post what image it is (exact filename and sha256sum) ? Even better is also kernel version and U-Boot version (exact UUID build strings), but a better human readable version will also give some hints already. And maybe upload armbianmonitor log, but that is maybe for later.

Hey!! Of course, I will test that one. Let me know (here or in a PM) what can I do for you. I only have a RV2 8GB RAM, but both M.2 slots are filled up (a 256GB nvme on the 2230 and a 512GB on the 2280) so I could test those as well. Everything I can learn will be welcome. Personally I would love to create a musl based, systemd free distro (alpine, void, etc.) for this little thing, but my knowledge is out of that league, I've only got some experience with OpenWRT on old routers Thank you!!

It is not recommended to match ZFS with vendor kernel(s). In general. Use mainline based current / edge kernels. Here v6.18.y we also might not have suitable ZFS yet as the kernel is too fresh. But if not today, it will be avail within days / weeks.

We have hundreds of releases and multiple per version per board hard to tell from this which kernel or which exactly i make a wild guess and the kernel you tried is 6.12.y which isn't good for desktop. try 6.1.115 (with mesa-vpu extension, not sure if there are pre-made ones) or 6.18, 6.19 mainline kernel.

Managed to find how to solve the issue! For anyone with the same board revision (IK316Q-EMCP_V4.1) and LPDDR3 memory who is struggling to boot standard images: I tried multiple generic builds (Ophub, etc.) and DTB edits without success. The solution was using this specific pre-configured image version from the sicXnull repository. The working image is: Armbian-unofficial_24.11.0-trunk_X96q_bookworm_current_6.6.44_mate_desktop.img.xz Download Link: https://github.com/sicXnull/armbian-build/releases/download/v24.8.0-trunk.425/Armbian-unofficial_24.11.0-trunk_X96q_bookworm_current_6.6.44_mate_desktop.img.xz It booted immediately. Hope this helps others with this specific hardware.

Hello!! I am looking for help to boot Armbian on a generic TV Box sold as "MXQ Pro 4K 5G". I have tried multiple images (including official and community builds from sicXnull), but I only get a black screen or signal loss immediately after the boot attempt. Device Specifications: Model on case: MXQ Pro 4K 5G Board ID: IK316Q-EMCP_V4.1 SoC: Allwinner H313 (identified as sun50iw9p1 in Android) RAM: 1GB (Single chip configuration) Storage: 8GB eMMC Current Status: I am able to boot into the stock Android. To attempt the Armbian boot, I've tryed the Power up method, the power up pressing the hidden AV switch, using the reboot update command from a terminal emulator within Android. The issue: Upon executing the reboot command, the Android system shuts down, the display signal cuts off (or stays black), and the device never initializes Armbian (no HDMI output, no LEDs blinking differently). What I have tried:

So I tried running Armbian Minimal/IoT version with kernel 6.1 and the fan is operating normally (tested it with the stress command). I didn't realize i was working with two different kernel versions. Sometimes you just need another set of eyes to look at a problem. Thanks for the help, cheers!

desktop: $ uname -a Linux opi5p-cl1 6.1.115-vendor-rk35xx #1 SMP Fri Nov 21 14:02:48 UTC 2025 aarch64 aarch64 aarch64 GNU/Linux minimal/iot: $ uname -a Linux orangepi5-plus 6.12.58-current-rockchip64 #3 SMP PREEMPT Thu Nov 13 20:34:41 UTC 2025 aarch64 aarch64 aarch64 GNU/Linux Good call, I'm going to download the other Minimal/IoT image that uses kernel 6.1 and give it a try. Will let you know what happens.

@JohnU Which kernel version of the desktop installation and which with the minimal?

Hello @brunorro. Yes, sometimes people are hacking badly. I have it working again after restarting with Armbian/Spacemit: u-boot starts, onboard BT and Wifi works, SD card is again reading with 80mb/s, transfer u-boot and SBI to MTD via armbian-install works (MTD boot is required for starting from SSD), both M.2 slots can boot from NVME. Sadly, the Broadcom SDIO wifi driver is a smoking mess. This driver needs heavy porting so its not available with linux-6.18 / edge currently. Are you willing to test anyhow? I can provide a 6.6.99 Trixie image for download if you ACK. There are always things that I may have overlooked such as USB, HDMI. All those little things I have not tested, I' on UART currently. LG // Sven-Ola

Vendor dtb is an Android/vendor kernel dtb. The code that goes into mainline linux is generally vastly different from vendor. So while the vendor dtb can provide some hints as to what is needed in a mainline dtb, it isn't even close to compatible.

Yesterday I was happy to see the new and fresh Armbian release for the Rock 5 ITX after about 1 year from the last update. I also tried the Armbian Imager and the SD creation was very easy and smooth. I selected the recommended release based on Ubuntu 24.04 + Gnome desktop. Unfortunately when the desktop was about to start, everything when black, stucked and zero interface. On the other hand, the OS is alive and I can connect remotely via SSH. Did anyone have the same problem? Possible solution? [EDIT]. sudo systemctl restart gdm and desktop pops up. Restarting the system, black again.

If you don't have X11 or Wayland, try using the linux command "fbi" (frame buffer image). I think I put an example in this trhead or in the Banana Pi ili9341 thread (in this allwinner forum section).