Many thanks for your replies. @Werner I can only say that I got the image via Armbian Imager, well designed for lazy people like me. This: On the Armbian Rock5 ITX web page, There are two candidates: 1 ) This one, because it's the only image in the list with variant "Gnome": or 2) this one, because it has the same size (1.4 GB), but doesn't say anything about the variant. The two images above have two different sha hashes. If it's true that isn't good for desktop (I agree with you because it doesn't work properly), I don't understand why it's tagged as "Recommended" on Armbian Imager. Anyway, I deleted everything and started from scratch, using another image tagged as "Recommended" based on Debian 13 and CLI only. This one is less complicated and till now works. @eselarm I tried two different monitors: the first one is quite modern as it supports not only many resolutions, but also different frequencies and other stuff. The second one is very basic: it can support up to 1980p at 60hz. In both cases, I got the same behavior. I also tried in the past EDK2-UEFI, but it didn't work very well on my Rock 5 ITX due to unexpected behaviors that I could not control in an effective way. That being said, unfortunately I don't have the exact filename and sha256sum of the previous image because I changed the image.

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