Guidelines
Keep in mind, the more time we need for solving your issues, the less time we have to develop Armbian. Bring up *random feature* to Armbian later might be related to the time we need to answer questions here. The following write-up should give you some insights how our forum is organized.
Maintained hardware section
Each board with a named person as maintainer is present here with an individual forum. If your board is not listed there state your question in the unmaintained hardware section.
- You have a hardware or kernel (e.g. missing a specific kernel module) related issue, that is the place to report it.
- Ubuntu/Debian userspace related questions (e.g why *random package* fails on installation) is likely not board-specific and should be asked here.
- If you face any sorts of instabilities over time, please have a look in the SD card and power supply sub forum. Armbian is trimmed on performance. Performance needs juice. Unreliable PSUs and/or powering cables will prevent that. The same counts for not reliable SD-Cards.
Before opening a topic please go to https://www.armbian.com/bugs/. This tool will guide you through first aid debugging and the process of collecting absolutely mandatory debug information you need to provide us.
A support question must include the following:
- Board you use
- Issue you face
- Description of your set-up (e.g. powering, connected hardware, used SD-Card)
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sudo armbianmonitor -u- this gives us some needed logs which makes debugging way easier!
We are not 'SBC Whisperers' or mind-readers! We need logs to work with, that's why
armbianmonitor -u was developed. If your board refuses to boot with a freshly prepared image from our download page, please read 'SD card and power supply' and 'Getting started' again. Chances are high that this is related to SD card and/or insufficient powering! If your board refuses to boot after upgrade try to provide a bootlog from serial console at least. USB-UART bridges are not that pricey ( <2 USD shipped from eBay/Aliexpress) and worth every cent when you work with SBCs.
Lastly most of us are not native English speakers and it is not an issue if your language is not polished. As long as you try to describe your system and your problem best it does not matter if there are some small errors in wording. Further we have docs.armbian.com, mostly written by developers, for users. A bunch of questions can be answered by reading the docs and or using the search-engine first.
Technical support questions where it will be clear that you have not read anything prior to making questions will be ignored!
Other important sections
- If you have no clue where to start state your question in the Beginners forum. Our moderators will take care of your topic and move it appropriately.
- For TV boxes we do not provide official Armbian support. But we do offer a build script which makes it possible to build images for TV boxes and we provide forums where people interested in Linux on TV boxes can discuss the issues they face.
- Off-Topic serves to discuss rumors towards shiny new toys and/or not Armbian related stuff - not always 100% serious here.
Advanced users
A section for more experienced users. For example for SoCs where Armbian support is currently not mature enough for full support, questions related to the build framework and 'Board Bring Up' for new boards we might consider supporting in the future. We cannot provide the same level of support for WIP (work in process) SoCs cause kernels for those boards are simply not ready yet. Board Bring Up is mostly for experienced users which want to contribute in support for new boards/SoCs, a *please support random board* without any rational and no interest in contribution for such a support will simply be ignored. If you just want to point us to a new interesting board our water-cooler (Off-Topic) is the right place for it.