balbes150

The new version of the images 5.90_20190704  for S905x2 S922.
Added support for frequency adjustment. Now the system should be able to use all the power of these processors.

The new version of the images 5.90_20190704  for S905x2 S922.
Added support for frequency adjustment. Now the system should be able to use all the power of these processors.

Thank you, you gave me 10 minutes of laughter.
RPi is not able to even compete with normal TV boxes. His destiny, the competition with clone stuff and fakes.
The real price of the RPI 4 kit , which will be comparable to the average TV box starts from 70-80. This is a naive tale for losers that RPi 4 is cheap, designed for those who do not know how to count elementary.

New image ver 5.90

- 4 big cores on 28 nm, see the Tinker Board for a lesson in cooling that form factor.  (the Pi seems oddly underclocked, if I'm being honest, a 3288 will go 1.8 GHz, @wtarreau will tell you 2.0+)
 
- As far as USB3/Gb, the tunnel-vision Pi people would have seen an insane improvement with just 4x USB2 on their own channels and a 100 Mb PHY.  So yes, they are going to think they're lighting the world on fire performance wise.
 
- That USB-C does not appear to be intelligent PD type, so I'd be interested to see when people use smart supplies with it, if it will run on the 500 mA they'll probably limit to.  (correct me if I've gotten it mixed up)
 
It looks more interesting than the Pi 3, I bought a few 3's and have since let them rot.  I still used a 2 until recently for music.

replaced /lib/frmware/brcm in 5.88 from that in 5.86 -> wireless networks detected but can't connect yet
 
connected to wlan with gnome-keyring-daemon running :-)
fixed Armbian_5.89_Rk3399-tv_Ubuntu_bionic_default_4.4.154_desktop_20190627 as well

What would "think" need UART logs and content (uEnv.ini) .

Ive updated the guide I wrote to cover these additional topics:
 
Example of setting up a system Example Setup on a MeCool M8S PRO w (Change your DTB file in uEnv.ini and extlinux.conf for other boxes).
- Hardware you need
- Software/Downloads Setting it up
- Steps to image your SD Card/USB stick from a Windows PC
- Installing onto the MeCool M8S PRO w (Or any other box assuming youve changed the DTB) Congratulations - If you reach here you will have a working Armbian server.

Booting Problems and getting your system to boot Booting off SD/USB problems. uEnv.ini and extlinux.conf (Required for booting Armbian)
- Editing the files and picking the right DTB.
- What do these 2 files do and why cant I boot off emmc internal ram?
- What should the files look like? Installing onto emmc/NAND - The internal hard drive of the TV box. LOST.DIR, System Volume Information and Android folders cause problems booting off eMMC/NAND.

What to do if you brick your device. Ive done something and now my box wont boot/stuck on a splash screen/is a brick what do I do?
- Getting the system recovered - notes
- Doing the recovery

Bootable Backups (can be used to migrate to another TV Box too) Backing up if you are using SD card/USB stick for booting/running Armbian OS
- You will need the following to do this
- How to get things setup and do it (create/restore your image) Backing up if you are using emmc/NAND for booting/running Armbian OS
- You will need the following to do this
- Option A and Option B
- How can I tell Ive booted from my Backup SD card? 
- What have we actually just done?
- What can I do with my imaged SD card?

For anyone getting stuck with their box:
 
- Setup and Imaging
- Booting
- What are DTB files about
- uEnv.ini and extlinux.conf
- Bricked your box etc
- Installing to emmc/NAND
 
Ive written this general guide.
 
 
I dont expect to answer every question/solve every problem, but it perhaps centralizes a lot of questions/answers people seem to keep asking on the forum.
 

Can now add an Armbian image Assembly for TX6.
 
https://forum.libreelec.tv/thread/17636-tanix-tx6/?postID=121128#post121128

Hello reader
 
I will report here about my experience to watch Netflix as written in the title. To do so, I got a current LE image from @balbes150 (thank you).
 
You may be asking the same question as I do (did), why using the image from balbes and not the official one from the download page ?

It is actually quite simple, balbes integrates the latest Kernel for his LE builds. While on a x86 system the kernel isn't so interesting, it is on ARM systems, because a lot of the development happens 1 or 2 year later of the release of the SoC.
 
I have asked him about the different versions he offers for Le Potato:
 
All versions of libreElec (LE) use the common core of aarch64 (64 bits).
There is only one 32-bit library (arm) for Netflix. Therefore, I am releasing two versions of LE.
ARM version = core of aarch64 + the whole ARM system. aarch64 = core aarch64 + whole system aarch64, this version runs 20-30 % faster than ARM.  By the way, it would be interesting to check if Netflix works on Armbian, it may be possible to run it in the environment aarch64 + 32 bit library.
 
So I chose this image: LibreELEC-AMLGX.arm-9.1-devel-20190604084103-a41fdf1-lepotato
 
After writing the image on the SDcard I had to walk through the basic configuration of LE (by the way no SSH - you must use a Display and Keyboard) you find more information here:
https://forum.libreelec.tv/board/38-amlogic/
  https://libreelec.wiki/
 
YouTube
A german screenshot film, that guides you through the process of installing the Netflix addon from libdev + jojo + asciidisco https://youtu.be/gyue62JWEkc
 
Netflix addons; the Kodinerds repository is already part of LE, that saves you some time, update this first.
The update and install of the Netflix addon (libdev + jojo + asciidisco), which has some dependencies, is tricky. I had repeated this process several times and a reboot once, because it would only install a few, but not all of the 9 dependencies at once. After 4 or 5 times it confirmed: installed.  Now, keep following the YouTube film mentioned above.
 
Adding your credtials to get access to Netflix.
 
WideVine for digital rights mgmnt (DRM), is extracted from ChromeOS - this will download 2Gb
 
Load on the hardware
Press the "O" key on the keyboard when playing the video and the service information about the video will be displayed on the screen. It is Software-Decoding for Netflix.
2 cores were running at around 50%  and  2 cores were idle (1280 x 720). Testing it on my TV it switched to FullHD at which point it got useless audio and picture were no longer insync.
 
SSH (Secure Shell)
During configuration you will see the SSH menu item. You can turn on SSH and you should then change the password!!
However, reading the Wiki I got the feeling that this implementation is a bit weird... that said, I would turn it off if you don't need it.
 
WiFi
For to me unkown reason the binaries for the USB-WiFi Sticks were removed in 2017: https://github.com/LibreELEC/LibreELEC.tv/pull/1635 , luckily it is easy to add the driver.
cd /storage/.config/  and here you do: mkdir -p firmware  and now  cd firmware/
unplug your USB-WiFi Stick, plug it in again and do: dmesg | tail -7   you can now see your stick and which binary is missing. Search the binary on this website and complete the line with your binary link:
wget https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware...
reboot
 
no APT
There is no working 'apt-get'.  TIP: use XBMC's addon browser to enhance your LibreELEC system
 
 
to be continued
 

magicsee-n6-max disco desktop 
 
NEXT missing magicsee dtb, so untested
 
Went back to bionic, desktop looks sharper

Trying out disco desktop on my MX10, great so far 

balbes150, thanks you a lot, especially for your patience that you demonstrate answering user's questions (wich sometimes seems are not adequate)
I want to share my successful experience with my TV Box - Mini M8S II (p212 motherboard and amlogic905X). I turned it into Nextcloud Server/Storage with armbian/ubuntu on internal eMMC.
1. tv box no need dual-booting, it boots automatically in order: USB - SD card - eMMC.
2. i used latest images Armbian_5.88_Aml-s905_Ubuntu_bionic_default_5.1.0_20190607.img
3. i backed up eMMC 
4. i flashed eMMC with 'su-' --> './install.sh' painlessly whithout errors. And 1st boot was successful.
5. SSH become lagging. Im using LAN and decide turn off wi-fi totally. 
/etc/network/interfaces
uncomment
wireless-mode Managed
wireless-power off
 
And lags/freezing went away.
The speed and reaction from eMMC is much better than SDcard (even 10 class)!
Spasibo eshe raz, balbes150.

I have been compiling the Linux kernel natively on some Amlogic TV boxes I have running Armbian. I can compile the Linux kernel in 44 minutes on an S912 box. Using distcc the time goes down to around 15 minutes. The distcc build farm is basically made up of Amlogic TV boxes connected with a 100mbps switch.
I have posted a HOWTO about distcc on aarch64 here: http://wiki.loverpi.com/specs:sbc:distcc-kernel-compile
 
It takes around two hours to build an image using Armbian on my Thinkpad-T420 with a relatively fast Internet connection, start-to-finish.
I expect Armbian-NG will take less than an hour to build an image using distcc on my low-cost build farm.
 

I would like to announce that I am getting started on an armbian-derived project, Armbian-NG. This is not a fork of Armbian, nor a rewrite, it's a derived project that piggyback's on the excellent work by Igor and the entire armbian development team. I think of Armbian-NG as armbian's little clumsy brother, who is just learning to walk but has great potential. 
In as few words as possible, Armbian-NG will be a Python (set of) script(s) that runs natively on Aarch64 (64-bit ARM) hardware (running Ubuntu 18.04 or later) to build Armbian images. More details  can be found here: https://github.com/AndrewBCN/Armbian-NG
 
As with armbian, anybody is welcome to contribute with code and ideas to Armbian-NG. And since no project is worth its storage space without a logo, Armbian-NG already has one. 

https://forum.freaktab.com/forum/tv-player-support/amlogic-based-tv-players/s922x/767132-amlogic-s922x-let-s-get-things-interesting?p=774820#post774820
 

Good news. The latest versions of Armbian and LE work well on Ugoos AM6. By the way, LE is running the sound through HDMI on Odroid N2 and Ugoos AM6.
 
https://yadi.sk/d/OKl5cdXZGEOwpQ

Update image ver 5.88
 
 
I received an Ugoos AM6 sample yesterday.
My goal is full launch and support for Armbian  and LibreELEC. First impressions are very positive. This TV box has a really great metal case (by the way, the price of a good metal case can reach 30-40$). For 90% of use cases, this completely solves the issue with cooling, i.e. the user does not need to modify anything himself. At the same time it solves the problem of protection of components from external radio interference and so solves the problem of radio interference from the component for regular WiFi\BT.

Hi, I also noticed this issue with other debian images since 2 months. You have to edit manually /etc/environment to set you locales and LC_ALL settings.
It seems to be a debian issue, not armbian specific.

In order to be able to use direct launch from USB , you need to make changes to ENV for SPI. This can be done through the UART console (this method is described TV this topic), or if release a new version of Piteboot for N2 with these additions. I've suggested to HK representatives to do this through an official update Piteboot SPI, but no response has been received yet. I can collect  own version of this upgrade Piteboot, but I think that this way should be collected, verified and submitted officially from HK. If HK will release such update, I am ready to send to GIT HK for u-boot SPI the necessary patch.

I have just seen this issue on the 5.2-rc integration branch,  to get mmc booting I needed to ensure I did try to remount any disks from fstab (it would crash here).  When I did get it to boot if I pushes the mmc hard it hung (waiting on mmc) and load slowly increased with a lot of io wait.  SD card does not have this issue. and usb seems fine.
 
Trying to find a solution and this looks interesting which I am yet to try...
 
https://lkml.org/lkml/2019/5/23/574
 
Edit:  the problem can occur with sd card as well after some time,  will try the patch above
 
Edit: mmc / sd problems seem to have disappeared wtih patch above

The website has added images of the Server Disco
 
By the way, all the latest images for N2 now have support for direct launch from USB.

The website has added images of the Server Disco
 
By the way, all the latest images for N2 now have support for direct launch from USB.

I added to the site new images 5.87 for N2 with kernel 5.1 which already have the necessary scripts to start the activation of multi-boot (n2_autoscript) and start the system from USB (boot.scr).
If activation is already done, then after burning the image to USB media, you do not need to add\change anything. When you connect to N2 in the USB stick, the system automatically starts up. By the way, I checked the fast USB 3.0 flash drive on N2 , the speed is higher than the SD card. And when using USB-SSD , much faster than eMMC.
 
 
p.s.
After comparing the operation of the system with eMMC and with a good USB-SSD, I concluded that eMMC is not needed for N2 at all.