Igor

This should be labelled as "untested", but its also covered by our work largerly. Keeping general stability on Allwinner SoC stack (and on boards developers use for doing this) costs just our project hundreds of engineering hours. At some release more, at some less, four times per year. Excluding all other work that needs to be done, maintaining automation, project management, ... Put "software support sponsored by Armbian team" on your product or support developers that does the work instead of you. Software perfection is what everyone wants, including us. But the problem is that everyone looks the other way, when we start talking about costs trying to get there.

https://gitee.com/bianbu-linux#introduction This is a BSP (board support package) which usually consist from: - kernel - boot loader - libraries for this and that functionality - fw flashing tools - userspace hacks - some tech documentation ... In embedded world, OS is usually custom to cover certain case. One have to build OS (with for big team tools = buildroot / yocto, while Armbian provide more human approach to make and to use. We are assembling all those elements (instead / for you) + OS generation which is distributed similar to other Linux distros. I agree we don't have good mechanisms for generating normal Debian packages. However, board userspace hacks can be put to our board support Debian package. Example: https://github.com/armbian/build/blob/main/config/boards/gateway-gz80x.conf#L15-L19

When you will add this with a PR here: https://github.com/armbian/build/blob/main/packages/bsp/common/usr/lib/armbian/armbian-firstlogin#L601 and group before that.

New images were generated and u-boot package build with force u-boot update enabled, then shipped to repository. Testing was not performed as I don't have equipment nor time. Check Gold subscription and become a partner in covering some of the costs we had because you are using this hardware. If you would already did that, we would have a lot less situations as this one.

Do the same for max: https://github.com/armbian/os/commit/45e7773d8fa023f3c5fb3c9c1402bf3616c59031 and wait for next automated rebuild cycle of community maintained images. Then download pre-configured Gnome desktop image and forget about any other browser then preinstalled one. Also forget general understanding about desktop Linux on PC ... this is embedded Linux / custom hardware world, where things are "a bit" different. Developing and keeping functional desktop image was already on the level of miracle considering that we are operating with big negative budget and absolute absence of any support from HW dealer that makes big sales ... which are crushing ability of making things better. For you and for us. Or dive into https://docs.armbian.com/Developer-Guide_Overview/

Strange. Trying to understand, because we don't do anything unusual. Defaults are plain straightforward: https://docs.armbian.com/User-Guide_Networking/#armbian-defaults and should work. They work "at my network" Perhaps this has something to do with:

Interesting, do you have explanation?

Ubuntu image has Network Manager backend. Perhaps that is the reason?

This can be skipped, unless Debian Bookworm and Ubuntu Noble XFCE is not enough. We provide fresh, weekly automated builds at download pages https://www.armbian.com/orange-pi-plus-2/ but dunno if images works.

This is a reminder that for production quality someone needs to constantly invest time. We build community images for amateur usage and to match other projects support levels. We also keep archives of almost all older builds: https://archive.armbian.com/orangepi2/archive which could serve as a cheap workaround. We do that for many boards, but there are simply too many of them. Producing them is dirt cheap ... maintaining extremely expensive. There is also lack of cooperation from 3rd party projects and vendor in question. Support goes in reverse order, they actually harm us all the time, consume our work, contribute nothing. Orangepi also only invests in sales and does not support open source developers / projects. For our group I can tell you 1st hand, but I have solid information that others are also unlucky. We are happy to help. https://www.armbian.com/contact/ -> Quick start Not sure what is current support status. It could be very broken with weeks to invest or not so much. Last time I had those boards (2e to be precise) in the automating testing, they were not very stable. Reboot sometimes didn't bring them back, crashing on load ...

Also we fixed TUI / GUI way of setting UARTS, merged today: https://github.com/armbian/configng/issues/360 https://github.com/armbian/configng/issues/344 fixed with https://github.com/armbian/configng/pull/393

That is sadly far from reality. I can name two copycat projects that are getting from us everything and in 10 years they together made <5 fixes to common problem (less then 1 vs. 1000). Open source is a very dirty place for people that contribute. What is being worked together is within our team and few external projects that have healthy and fair attitude. Those conditions has to be met: https://docs.armbian.com/User-Guide_Board-Support-Rules/#standard-support If everything is met, which is already a miracle, there is a "must be beneficial to the Armbian project". This term helps us fighting hardware vendors abuses - this vendor owe us substantiation amount for contracted services. We can't allow to fool us at any condition. Which are in general often damaging for open source, our and similar projects. But you usually can't understand from consumer perspective, if you don't look ... why would you? You just want that everything works. Finding serious and dedicated maintainers for vendors that have abuse in the name is just impossible. I can see you are a good guy, but x % of our "customers" are total morons, few percent are total abusers and are making everything to profit from our work, contributing nothing. And by the end of the day, most people see us as guilty because shit hardware doesn't work perfectly ... as everyone (or most of people) expects. Orangepi won't add "Sponsored by Armbian" or "we are stealing software support from Armbian / open source community" to their web page, so this is the only way to tell you Don't buy from them anymore any we will be friends. They are damaging to us. And to you. Donations never went over 0.5% of costs. I am in this for 10 years. Being super polite and friendly or being an ass. Makes no difference. It is devastating for open source developers. We need to bring 99.5% to satisfy you.

Yesterday bugfix release of rockchip64-current should address this problem. In stable channel, beta is anyway having latest.

Make them build & boot able within the build framework https://github.com/armbian/build When you confirms, open a PR https://github.com/armbian/build/pulls and change config file from .eos to .csc and automation will become to produce images.

I am sure you can find a kernel in Armbian repository, modern enough, to cover your needs. If this is not good enough, fix the bug, hire someone to fix the bug. Perhaps you will then understand how crazy your expectations are? Support is emotional and financial nightmare, which we have no way to cover for every hw that comes from greedy hw vendor that sets you expectations and leave this place. It can always be brought back by filling roles (not just maintainer but all). We struggle to maintain Allwinner kernel and tooling that allows re-building images at any moment, with modern user-land. We don't sell anything, we rely on your (non existing) donations. Which cover 0.5% of the costs. The rest we need to cover - tell me how? For you and dirty open source copycat projects, that never contribute any fixes to common problems. Vendor in question have no interest that this old board still works. You need to buy a new one ... and new one. I would very much like to help, but am already full time volunteer with a way too small crew of great people facing insane big bug / maintenance issues. Keeping such information accurate and usable is again - expensive, logistical nightmare. If there is nobody that have spare time and is willing to do this for free, this can't exists. Remember that with what we provide now, we already struggle big time and for 99% of costs we need to cover them with 3rd party work.