lanefu

This is an adaptation of something @SteeMan wrote in this post, but we need to refer to it often enough that I thought I would make it into a sticky.
 
Amlogic (S9xx) Android based TV Boxes

1. They are not supported.
2. A single developer (@balbes150) had worked years on getting things to the state they are.
3. As of October 14th, 2020 balbes150 removed support for Amlogic CPUs, so that is the last build that will maybe work on your box.
4. There is a very small number of people on this forum/club that are able to provide any guidance.
5. Most likely no one on this forum/club has ever seen your specific box.
6. Expectations should be set low (i.e. don't expect anything to work) but if you do get the box to boot, get HDMI and wired ethernet to work, you are doing good.
7. You really shouldn't expect things like Wi-Fi, bluetooth, remote control, etc. to work.
8. If you get this working on your box, it will likely only be useful for server type tasks, maybe a little light graphical desktop usage, but certainly not video/multimedia.
 
Other RockChip (rk3399, rk3328, rk3288) and Allwinner (H5, H6) based TV Boxes
 
9. These will continue to be supported within the limits that are possible for the equipment the devs possess.
10. They are (in fact, have always been) CSC which means Community Support only!  In other words, not officially supported by the Armbian project!
 
So, why even have these forums?
 
As a place for people to try and get together and help one another.  At least it is something.
 
Also, there used to be a lot more (better supported) activity here while balbes150 was still releasing his fork of Armbian.
 
What other options do I have?
 
I (@TRS-80) recommend cutting your losses and starting over, and this time around using the list of Armbian Supported Devices as a starting point for researching purchasing some other device.  Taking this approach will result in a much easier time, less hassle, better support, and usually for a much longer period of time (assuming things for your device get mainlined into Linux kernel).
 
Even using that list as a starting point, do your homework.  As any particular device can have some little quirks / gotcha(s).  There are a lot of resources available on the (wider Armbian) forums already, please use them!
 
@SteeMan however takes a different view.  He lay out his arguments in favor of trying anyway (see below) in spite of all the above.
 
If you choose to go that route, at least we can say we warned you now. 
 
Why is situation like this?
 
Source of following quote was Armbian official Twitter, on 2020-12-02 11:23 EST:
 
 
SteeMan also touch on this in his excellent post, below.
 
Now hopefully you at least understand why most people may not wish to spend their own valuable free time to help someone who chose an unsupported box, mostly because it was cheap (and possibly without even doing much research beforehand).  SteeMan (and a few other guys in here like jock and some others) being the rare exceptions who relish a challenge.
 
Good luck!

I fully agree with @TRS-80 comments above directing most users towards officially supported SBC hardware options.  However, I do want to add my own personal thoughts on why I choose to continue to use these Android TV boxes with unsupported armbian running on them:
 
1) It is a challenge and therefore a learning opportunity.  I would never have learnt to build my own linux kernels from source if I was still exclusively using x86 hardware.  If you want a challenge you will find it here.
 
2) Price vs specs.  The Android TV boxes are built to be cheap consumer devices.  They are produced in larger quantities which drives down the per unit price.  You will generally not be able to get the same level of hardware for the same price with a standard SBC.  But that cheapness with - no support by the manufacturers and potentially sub-standard components.  If the manufacturers goal is to sell the lowest price box they are likely cutting corners somewhere to make that happen.
 
3) emmc is standard.  TV boxes always come with internal storage while most SBCs do not.  Again from a price/performance standpoint having internal emmc storage vs running off an SD card is a plus.  emmc storage *should* be faster and longer lasting than storage on an sd card.  The caveats here being that this is one of the areas that the manufacturers may cut corners.  For example I have two TX3 mini boxes that are supposed to have 16GB of emmc memory (like the other TX3 mini boxes I have), but they were instead manufactured with cheaper nand memory for which there is no mainline kernel support.  There is no visible difference between the identically packaged boxes that had emmc vs those that came with nand, other than opening the case and looking at the physical chips on the boards.
 
4) cases come standard.  TV boxes always come with cases, whereas for SBCs that is an extra cost.  For my uses having a case is a big improvement vs not having one.  A downside if that these cases are not necessarily well designed to provide adequate cooling.  So depending on your use case, overheating might be a problem.
 
While I own both SBCs and TV boxes, I personally find the TV boxes work best for my needs (running server based software) and I enjoy the challenge of getting them running and keeping them running with the great underlying work that the armbian project is doing to build on top of.
 
I feel that if someone wants to use *unsupported* armbian on TV boxes and has the correct expectations (set your expectations low) and is looking to learn and is up for a challenge these are fun things to work with.  And I look forward to working with you on these forums.

tl;dr. The 500€ subscription has been removed. No one took the generosity challenge
 
As a replacement we added a 20€ monthly subscription to attract people who would like to give more than 5€ but 50€ would be too much.
Existing Small business subscriptions have been "upgraded" to Angel color-wise.
 

Forums, apt and downloads will be off-line for approximately 30 minutes for system maintenance.   Thanks your understanding.

Forums, apt and downloads will be off-line for approximately 30 minutes for system maintenance.   Thanks your understanding.

Forums, apt and downloads will be off-line for approximately 30 minutes for system maintenance.   Thanks your understanding.

This discussion is interesting because I can relate to both sides.
As an end user - having multiple filesystems to choose from is great, choosing the right one is where I need to spend my time choosing the right tool for the task. Having a ZFS DKMS is great, but if after an update my compiler is missing a kernel header, I won't be able to reach my data. Shipping a KMOD (with the OS release) might give me access to my data after each reboot/upgrade. The ECC/8GB RAM myth is getting old but it has garnered enough attention that most newbies won't read or search beyond the posts with most views.
 
Armbian as a whole is always improving - a few weeks ago iSCSI was introduced for most boards (and helped me replace two x86_64 servers with one Helios64) - and an implementation of ZFS that works out of the box will be added soon enough. That being said, this is a community project - if a user wants 24x7 incident support, then maybe the ARM based SBCs + Armbian are not the right choice for them. Having a polite discussion with good arguments (like this thread) is what gets things moving forward - We don't have to agree with all the points, but we all want to have stable and reliable systems as our end goal.

I only now see this post. 
Indeed as @TRS-80 said my favorite for desktop tasks is the NanoPi M4V2 with Armbian Bionic legacy and @JMCC his media script. Now also possible in Buster.
For me watching video, mostly Youtube is very important. And I've got a 4k display, so I rather have a higher display resolution than 1080p.
The RK3399 from the NanoPi M4V2 does 1440p without a problem. And it then plays 1080p video perfect with VPU acceleration. 

Its I/O is just amazing. 2x fast USB3 controllers for each 2 ports, left and right. (every 1 controller is faster/better than the only 1 controller on N2+)
Has PCIe GPIO's what fits an NVMe hat/SATA hat, USB3 hat.
I've got a 256GB NVMe on it. Doing initial boot from eMMC, and full boot from NVMe. I must say that the RockPi4 has a faster NVMe drive(4x PCIe vs 2x PCIe on M4V2), but I like the metal case from the M4V2 a lot more. And not the bandwith is most important using NVMe, but latency. And that's the same.
Also a big swap file of 8GB on NVMe so I never get out of memory. Works great, but does decrease the lifespan of an NVMe drive. I replace it every year just to be safe and then use the used NVMe as external USB3 device.

I also have an sd-card with a Armbian mainline focal image for playing games on it. I just need to push that sd-card in and reboot to get to my 2nd image. 

For a few months google account didn't work on the VPU accelerated Chromium on the RK3399. So then I used Vivaldi browser for watching Youtube. But that could only do 1080p video with 1080p display resolution.
So I switched my M4V2 with the Odroid N2+ for a while. That one is able to play 1080p video at 1440p display resolution. Tho not perfectly as the RK3399. Some dropped frames, some screen tearing.

I do like the extra CPU performance of the N2+. But in desktop tasks I rarely need a lot of CPU power. 
All I do is browsing, answering on this forum and on others, watching youtube, writing textfiles, downloading images and writing them to media, record audio, ...

All tasks that do not need much CPU. So RK3399 is more than powerful enough. 

If not for the media script from JMCC I'd take the Odroid N2+ before my M4V2. But having VPU driver is so nice that my N2+ is playing 2nd fidel.
Future wise the N2+ might become the better one if GPU and VPU drivers are availabe for it. It can do a lot with its CPU alone. 

Only for video editing and rendering I use my PC. And a few games that don't work on my M4V2. But these days even gaming on it is just awesome.
 
Good choice. Do know that the RockPi4 is a bit fidly to put together with the NVMe hat, and its heatsink is a little less potent. 
The NVMe then can go upwards of 1GB/s vs 750MB/s on the M4V2. 
Greetings.
 

I read this several days ago, and it bother me, although I didn't know what to say about it.  It bother me for days, actually.  Until today reading this post make me think of you again, so I come searching back and find this thread so I can reply.
 
When you said
 
 
I picture you toiling away in your lab, as many of us do, often alone, in order to solve some problem.  I think all sciences have advanced through millennia by such efforts.
 
I think you just got unlucky with some (very specific) question.  Apparently the right people did not see your thread.  Or maybe no one knows anything that can help.  I have seen many times in these forms people replying to old threads from months, even years ago with some additional information, partial, or full solution.
 
Anyway, now there is a solution, thanks to your efforts.  I thank you for sharing your results, which I think are even more important as that is the only way we all may advance together.
 
However, next time you are feeling alone, and/or discouraged, please do drop by IRC and say hello.  Until then, cheers, mate!

Origin:
https://armbian.atlassian.net/browse/AR-200
 
Description:
SBCs become more and more powerful and one of our long term goals is to enhance the desktop experience with Armbian.
At the moment we only have @Rich Neese who spends a crazy amount of time to push this forward.
 
Destination:
https://github.com/armbian/build/tree/desktop
 
Skills required:
Bash, dealing with configuration files of various desktop environments

From the wiki:
Source: https://wiki.kobol.io/helios64/sata/#sata-controller-diagram

already done.  Igor merged native into desktop the other day.  https://github.com/armbian/build/pull/2404

This tutorial is based on my knowledge and experience in testing Tinkerboard. It has not been tested on other devices and I do not take any responsibility nor am I liable for any damage that may be caused through the use of this tutorial.
 
Debian / XFCE minimal desktop
Download the latest current version of Bullseye (Panfrost drivers included) for your device and follow the instructions 
https://www.armbian.com/download/ After the first login type ... 
exit (exit from root, login with your new user id)
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade (if the kernel installation prompts for modifications, just say Yes or Ok)
sudo apt install task-xfce-desktop xfce4-terminal firefox-esr network-manager-gnome gparted
sudo reboot Login graphically with your user id ...
Open Firefox and check if you have access to internet Open xfce terminal and add the basic xfce packages
sudo apt install pulseaudio pavucontrol gvfs gvfs-backends policykit-1 udisks2 catfish mousepad xarchiver gdebi gigolo
sudo reboot  
Find out ...
ARM architecture of your computer processor
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ARM_microarchitectures Latest Chrome version
https://www.google.com/search?q=The+latest+user+agents+for+Chrome&oq=The+latest+user+agents+for+Chrome&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i60l3&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 Download the user agents text file for the latest Chrome version with the platform Chrome OS
ARMv7 (armhf / 32-bit)
https://user-agents.net/download?browser=chrome&version=87-0&browser_bits=32&platform=chromeos&platform_bits=32&name=armv7l or 
ARMv8 (arm64 / 64-bit)
https://user-agents.net/download?browser=chrome&version=87-0&platform=chromeos&name=aarch64 (use the highest version)  
Vivaldi browser installation
 Download Vivaldi (https://vivaldi.com/download/archive)
ARMv7 (armhf / 32-bit)
https://downloads.vivaldi.com/stable/vivaldi-stable_3.4.2066.106-1_armhf.deb or
ARMv8 (arm64 / 64-bit)
https://downloads.vivaldi.com/stable/vivaldi-stable_3.4.2066.106-1_arm64.deb Open GDebi and install your specific Vivaldi browser  
Create a desktop launcher
Name: DRM browser Command: /usr/bin/vivaldi-stable --disable-seccomp-filter-sandbox --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (X11; CrOS armv7l 13505.40.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/87.0.4280.54 Safari/537.36"
 *** Use the latest user agents text string ***  
Open Vivaldi with the DRM browser launcher and verify the parameters ...
user agent: https://whatmyuseragent.com components: vivaldi://components (check if Widevine Content Decryption Module is loaded) gpu:  vivaldi://gpu flags:  vivaldi://flags Enable > Override software rendering list  
Widevine-flash installation
Close any opened Vivaldi Browser  Open xfce terminal and download the script that fetches a ChromeOS image and extracts the Widevine and Flash
ARMv7 (armhf / 32-bit)
git clone https://gist.github.com/e025024ecffa45ee4325a3915fd8dad1.git widevine-flash
ARMv8 (arm64 / 64-bit)
git clone https://gist.github.com/7e1e1c313843d6a8180cfc1f47bee6aa.git widevine-flash
cd widevine-flash
sudo sh ./widevine-flash_arm32.sh or sudo sh ./widevine-flash_arm64.sh (and follow the instructions) Open Vivaldi with the DRM browser launcher and check if DRM is working
https://bitmovin.com/demos/drm  
Now you are ready to watch Netflix :-) Cheers!

Hello all, I will post the scripts for the other devices (arm32 / arm64) soon!

This is what I was most worried about, especially being relatively newer contributing on GitHub.  I wanted to help out and try to improve things, whilst not upsetting anyone nor the apple cart too much, either.
 
 
I was thinking GitHub might be better place to encourage more community involvement, as "almost everybody" seem to have an account there nowadays.  Then you guys can have your Jira to yourselves where you are not being bothered too much. 

It's cool you were able to put this together, but im not really a fan of random bespoke images.    They don't encourage a healthy community. 
 
Im assuming you did this all by hand and don't have any scripts the community could work on altogether? 

It's cool you were able to put this together, but im not really a fan of random bespoke images.    They don't encourage a healthy community. 
 
Im assuming you did this all by hand and don't have any scripts the community could work on altogether? 

I re-worked the Labels/Tags on GitHub last night.  The idea was to be able to (allow more people to) triage things, communicate status and workflow more clearly to all of interested parties that @Igor listed further up thread, and reduce visual noise (all those different colors were killing me; "don't make me think", etc.).
 
However I did this with no direction or feedback whatsoever (in fact at first I was hesitant on such big changes, but at some point maybe halfway I just decided to "wing it" and go all the way).  So if there were any particular workflows you guys were trying to support, or different axes to slice things along using tags, please let me know and I can give them another polish pass.
 
One feature I incorporated were coloring all "Community involvement" things green.  This way it will be easy to point people there, "just go to GitHub and look for green tags."
 
In a similar vein, I also created a "good first issue" tag.  So if there are some things you know are trivial, please start using this.  It will allow people like me who are new and have an interest to find easy things to start working on, while also offloading them from you guys so you can spend your focus on the more complicated stuff.
 
I'm really interested to hear what you guys think about the changes.

I installed this u-boot ontop of my already running armbian eMMC install and boot time improved dramatically... and it will boot from sdcard if one is inserted

i just downloaded files and followed instructions
 
https://github.com/pcm720/u-boot-build-scripts/releases/tag/v2020.07-1

Bugfix v1 was already pushed out:
 
[AR-551] - Update fan configuration, enable network LED and enable UPS timer Updated Helios64, Rockpi 4* images and rockchip64 kernels  
Bugfix v2
 
Let's try to patch other critical things before Christmas. I already addressed ZFS problem on Focal by adding most recent DKMS package, but to solve it also for Buster it requires all kernel recompilation - in case you want to push some late changes, now it's the time. The Beast can handle that in no time  We hopefully fixed Odroid HC4 (don't have HW to test), added KVIM2, DVFS on mvebu will be disabled from now on to secure stability (moving to 5.9.y ?) ... What will fail if we update Allwinner to 5.9.y? Mvebu? Rockchip.hf is ready. 
 
@Myy @TonyMac32 @balbes150 @piter75 @sfx2000@ebin-dev @Heisath@chwe@ning@lanefu@gprovost@aprayoga@5kft @JMCC@karabek@Igor@martinayotte@tkaiser@selfbg@Siraj@jock@going 
 
What else can be squeezed into this mini quick release? Smaller, almost done, things only.
 
I would also like to point out that we are progressing nicely with:

- updated Desktop variant (sits in our main build repository under the branch "desktop"), where also some other general things has been changed. Merge into master is estimated 2/2021, early adopters are welcome. There are other changes, not just desktop.
- native ARM building. Need more testing, but basics are working.
 
Today +7 days?

Hi everyone,
I found out that even a Chromium already installed and connected can become "not-login-able" (Chromium Arm64 from Ubuntu LTS 18.04).
It seems to me the servers from Google side are rejecting some browsers at first login; probably from user-agents.
 
A solution to this issue for now is very simple:
- Launch Chromium with a user-agent changer from the Chrome extensions store using a Firefox user-agent label.
- Login to your Google account, it will probably work this way.
- Check the box "remember this machine"
You can then uninstall  the extension, restart Chromiun and use it back again as itself.
 
Tested with:
* Chromium (Developer Build) 32 bit armhf (Armbian Focal - H3)
* Chromium (Official Build) 64 bit  arm64 (Armbian Bionic)
* Chromium (?) arm64 (Armbian Focal -  RK3399)
 
Best regards.
 

We've added some enhancements to our mirror redirect tool the allow you to choose a region.   
 
UPDATE: See Friendlier Documentation Here

The following regions are configured:
NA - North America
EU - Europe
AS - Asia (currently only china)
 
to use update the url in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/armbian.list from apt.armbian.com to apt.armbian.com/region/REGIONCODE
 
ex:
 
# cat /etc/apt/sources.list.d/armbian.list deb http://apt.armbian.com/region/NA focal main focal-utils focal-desktop  
If you'd like to choose a specifc mirror you can query https://apt.armbian.com/mirrors and find a mirror

We've added some enhancements to our mirror redirect tool the allow you to choose a region.   
 
UPDATE: See Friendlier Documentation Here

The following regions are configured:
NA - North America
EU - Europe
AS - Asia (currently only china)
 
to use update the url in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/armbian.list from apt.armbian.com to apt.armbian.com/region/REGIONCODE
 
ex:
 
# cat /etc/apt/sources.list.d/armbian.list deb http://apt.armbian.com/region/NA focal main focal-utils focal-desktop  
If you'd like to choose a specifc mirror you can query https://apt.armbian.com/mirrors and find a mirror

We've added some enhancements to our mirror redirect tool the allow you to choose a region.   
 
UPDATE: See Friendlier Documentation Here

The following regions are configured:
NA - North America
EU - Europe
AS - Asia (currently only china)
 
to use update the url in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/armbian.list from apt.armbian.com to apt.armbian.com/region/REGIONCODE
 
ex:
 
# cat /etc/apt/sources.list.d/armbian.list deb http://apt.armbian.com/region/NA focal main focal-utils focal-desktop  
If you'd like to choose a specifc mirror you can query https://apt.armbian.com/mirrors and find a mirror