hojnikb

Guys, you're going at this all wrong. For desktop use and 20$ best bet for a good experience is a used Dell, HP with a Core2 Duo type cpu. These are plentiful, since businesses get rid of them and you can easily pick one up for 20$ or less if you shop around.
 
It's going to give you much better desktop experience with common apps and OS than any A7 or A53 based SBC (these CPUs are muuuch slower than Core2). If you can spring extra $$$ for a few more gigs of ram (these typically come with either 2 or 4GB of ram) and a 60GB SSD (18$ from aliexpress) you can get a fluid desktop experience for peanuts.

Guys, you're going at this all wrong. For desktop use and 20$ best bet for a good experience is a used Dell, HP with a Core2 Duo type cpu. These are plentiful, since businesses get rid of them and you can easily pick one up for 20$ or less if you shop around.
 
It's going to give you much better desktop experience with common apps and OS than any A7 or A53 based SBC (these CPUs are muuuch slower than Core2). If you can spring extra $$$ for a few more gigs of ram (these typically come with either 2 or 4GB of ram) and a 60GB SSD (18$ from aliexpress) you can get a fluid desktop experience for peanuts.

I'd suggest using chromium:armhf on both arm and arm64 builds, as there really is no reason to use arm64 build of chromium, because it's more ram hungry and not faster on our ram limited boards. I've been using armhf version on PC2 for some time now and works just fine. Needs a tweak to get it working though.

Even if they get h264 decoding working, its going to be a huge win for allwinner community.
Having a working h265 isn't really all that useful to be honest, since the common chips (H3,H5 etc) only support 8 bit decoding, while most media i came across is encoded for 10 bit.
 
h264 media on the other hand is still widely available, so having mainline support would be awesome. Now if someone would get this working under chrome or firefox, that would be a different ballgame

Any word on something like orange pi pc3 (lan and usb3)

Sadly, a working MALI won't help with kodi/xbmc performance, as it's purely a OpenGL ES device and nothing else. For media playback, you need a working CedarX driver, which is a completely separate thing. Luckily it's being worked on in the form of Cedrus project.

Did you use this tutorial? http://surfero.blogspot.com.es/2017/04/freedompop-orange-pi-2g-iot.html
Please note that I saw reports that microSIM slot had incorrect markings and people had to insert the card "backwards" to get it working. Also IMEI is all zeroes so make sure that your mobile operator is not unhappy about it.

How about just lifting minimum voltage in AXP to above that of protection circuit ? This way, axp will cut off battery before internal protection can kick in. Or if you're brave enough, just remove protection from the battery all together and let axp do it's thing

try a different card and/or card reader. Obviously there is an issue, when burning the image.
If PSU is causing issues, the board would reset. Its less likely that it would cause you not being able to login.

PC+ was made before NAND started rapidly increasing in price.

guess you're right, but its still a good learning experience
Lesson learned; you can almost always do stuff with a single liner
 
Thank you for this, i was not aware of the ftd* command

If your card supports ERASE command (samsung cards to i believe) it's also a good idea to enable ERASE option in sdformatter. This will make the card factory fresh (all cells set to 1).

Well, most users will use crappy microusb power adapters, which are shit as you pointed out many times.
 
As for A53 efficiency scaling, you can test it yourself. Beyond 1Ghz, power consumption ramps up quite high. I might do a test for each frequency/voltage to further illustrate that.

if by multimedia you mean video decoding, then mali isn't the thing you're after (again, only does 3d, no 2d) but rather cedarX, which does video decoding in allwinner chips.

Unless you want 3D opengl ES accelaration, you don't need mali driver.

Maybe psu isnt really capable of 3A..

@Christos
 
Hold you horses. Perhaps you forgot that we do Armbian in our free time?
 
https://docs.armbian.com/Release_Changelog/

maybe the dram chips are dead..

Great stuff, got it working