Squatter

Thank you Martin.  30 seconds hard work & wlan0 is fine.  cpu seems to be running at the full 1.8GHz v. the throttled 1.5GHz of the OPi image.  I can confirm armbian WIP cpu benchmark ~20% faster over OPi image which seems to be consistent with the throttling.  And for some reason, the OPi image benchmark that I used only saw 3 of the 4 cpus so parallel performance is even higher.
 
Once over the wlan & HDMI hurdles, I now have a fully kitted out lxde environment accessible by rdp plus a full web development environment.  I had a minimum set of criteria re. performance & capability & all have been exceeded as I never planned to use HDMI anyway, nor do I have any immediate plans for PCiE or the IO pins.  I think I am now over comparing what the OPi image offered v. the armbian WIP.
 
The only glitches I encountered were related to rdp which appears to have stumbled universally on Ubuntu 18.04.2.  And some strange intermittent behaviour re. wlan losing nameservers (resolv.conf not being populated) after a reboot ... trying to pin that one down.  But these are software not hardware issues.
 
I will just press on assuming that everything I need to work just works ... as it does so far.  After 29 years in the unix sysadmin/builder role world (on and off) its now just a hobby.

Thank you Martin.  30 seconds hard work & wlan0 is fine.  cpu seems to be running at the full 1.8GHz v. the throttled 1.5GHz of the OPi image.  I can confirm armbian WIP cpu benchmark ~20% faster over OPi image which seems to be consistent with the throttling.  And for some reason, the OPi image benchmark that I used only saw 3 of the 4 cpus so parallel performance is even higher.
 
Once over the wlan & HDMI hurdles, I now have a fully kitted out lxde environment accessible by rdp plus a full web development environment.  I had a minimum set of criteria re. performance & capability & all have been exceeded as I never planned to use HDMI anyway, nor do I have any immediate plans for PCiE or the IO pins.  I think I am now over comparing what the OPi image offered v. the armbian WIP.
 
The only glitches I encountered were related to rdp which appears to have stumbled universally on Ubuntu 18.04.2.  And some strange intermittent behaviour re. wlan losing nameservers (resolv.conf not being populated) after a reboot ... trying to pin that one down.  But these are software not hardware issues.
 
I will just press on assuming that everything I need to work just works ... as it does so far.  After 29 years in the unix sysadmin/builder role world (on and off) its now just a hobby.