With modifications to lightdm.conf I got lightdm working with your tutorial, however lightdm and labwc don't seem to use the SPI display. I verified the setup works on an HDMI screen (with some weird artifacts on the right quarter side but thats a later problem). Do i need to specify lightdm / labwc to use the /sys/class/drm/card0-SPI-1? The only difference between your guide and my setup is I am running kernel 6.18, as I can't seem to find how to compile or install kernel 6.13. I only have 6.12, 6.14, and 6.18 available to install, and can only compile current and edge (6.12 and 6.18), but the compile script failed with a not found error when I attempted to specify 6.13. Not sure if that is relavent, since my setup seems to be working otherwise.

Thank you very much for your reply. That's exactly what I did. I have a custom Armbian image. When compiling, I selected my board for the 618 processor, as I couldn't find it in the standard section. I also found the panel-mipi-dbi parameter in the module selection menu. However, after compiling, writing the image to the flash card, and checking the module, the system didn't find it. I was able to build the image and include the module after correcting the boardconfig. It may have mistakenly listed the 616 processor, but I changed it to 618, and the image built successfully. After writing it to a flash drive and checking it in the system, I was finally able to find the required module. It was also displayed in the /boot/config(uname) configuration file.

Update: I was right, it is an allwinner system U-Boot 2014.07 (Aug 28 2020 - 08:44:29) Allwinner Technology Mali: ERR: /home/work/share/akrd6/custom_relese/H3_ANDROID7.0_BOX_SDK_V1.0_20190702_eng/lichee/linux-4.4/modules/gpu/mali-utgard/kernel_mode/driver/src/devicedrv/mali/linux/mali_platform.c These where the smoking guns that caught my eye, i will likely install Armbian in this anyhow.

I get this on a Debian Trixie VM allocated only 4x Cortex-A76 on ROCK5B 1048576+0 records in 1048576+0 records out 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB, 1.0 GiB) copied, 4.5407 s, 236 MB/s 2097152+0 records in 2097152+0 records out 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB, 1.0 GiB) copied, 4.24198 s, 253 MB/s Numbers are lower on RPi4B and ROCK3A. However, since in-place upgrade from Bookworm to Trixie, this slow ssh login is very noticeable and also rather annoying. So this is a Debian issue as far as I can see. I had the same Debian VM running on ROCK3A and was all nice with Bookworm, although only 1GB allocated and of course is 4x Cortex-A55, so slow for crypto and compression (real-time Zstd). Just after upgrade and reboot into Trixie I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why ssh login was so delayed/slow. Also noticeable that it was random, sometimes it was OK, mostly took multiple seconds. I did strace sshd and I saw just delay, waiting time in the process. More I could not figure out, would take me too much time and I had no clue where to look. The plan was anyway to move the VM (and NVME and HDD, the whole NAS setup) to ROCK5B so that is what I did then the next day or so. On the ROCK5B, I do not notice the delay that much, but it seems still to be there. I have no clue why. I use quite a lot ssh unattended, so that I don't care and notice. So I basically still do not know what this is, I have not searched for It, I just see this topic and I recognise it.

All this time, I thought you were using a custom H618 board hardware. Now it is clear to me, that you have an Orange Pi Zero 3, In armbian build, make sure you don't add any configuration files. Just do "./compile.sh" and when you get the menu for board selection, press the button "Unsupported/CSC" (or something like that). The text menu will turn red. Press OK and you will see a list of more Linux boards. Press "P" to quickly scroll down, then "UP" to find Orange Pi Zero 3. Then choose the option for Linux edge, and choose that you want to configure linux.