SteeMan

Thanks for posting this

Orange-pi-3-lts is not a supported board. It is Community Maintained which means there are no stable builds, only weekly rolling release builds that use the 'beta' repository. The stable repository is only for supported boards that receive stable builds.

I suspect that is your answer as to why one boots and the other doesn't when using the same kernel

Do you have the same uboot installed to spi as you have on the sd?

You need to find an original android firmware for you box and restore it using the Amlogic burning tool.

Moved to the correct forum: Community Maintained -> Rockchip. The NanoPC T4 is not a supported board. It is Community Maintained.

Everything looks correct if your intention is to be using the nightly repository for daily builds. You shouldn't need to use armbian-config for anything other than to switch from nightly to stable repositories. Using standard 'apt update' and 'apt upgrade' should be what you use to update all packages (both armbian and ubuntu).

What is the contents of your /etc/apt/sources.list.d/armbian.list file? and what is the output of: sudo apt list --installed | grep linux and: sudo apt list --installed | grep armbian

You are not missing anything. Currently stable gets updated each Armbian release (so every three months) and nightly is a new build every day.

The official answer is that it is not officially supported by Armbian nor tested. Having said that, it usually works. So you should have backups and have your expectations set that it may not work and you will need to go back to the backup.

Providing logs with armbianmonitor -u helps with troubleshooting and significantly raises chances that issue gets addressed. (Since you didn't provide info like versions or build information)

They are vastly different because one for for android and the other is for mainline linux. Vastly different code bases. Expert dtb gurus can gather info from one to help with the other but there aren't any such gurus generally in these forums providing that advise. That is why in the TV Box FAQ it says not to expect you will have working wifi. https://forum.armbian.com/topic/16976-status-of-armbian-on-tv-boxes-please-read-first

All of the userspace packages come directly from upstream repositories.

I think you are missing the point @Werner stated stated above. Wireguard is preinstalled on Armbian. So there isn't anything you should need to install other than the tools (depending on build). On all my Armbian install wireguard works with no extra installation required, just configuration.

Moved to the correct sub forum (Amlogic TV boxes)

There are hundreds of different TV boxes. No one likely has tried on those specific boxes. So I would say try from an SD card first to see if the box works at all, and note the warning in the install instructions that installing to emmc has risks (on any amlogic TV box).

No I don't. If they are not here https://armbian.tnahosting.net/archive/aml-s9xx-box/archive then they are no longer stored by Armbian. Have you tried a current build?

https://forum.armbian.com/topic/16976-status-of-armbian-on-tv-boxes-please-read-first Note the comments in the above link that these boxes are not suitable for use as a desktop replacement. https://forum.armbian.com/topic/33676-installation-instructions-for-tv-boxes-with-amlogic-cpus Note the comment in the install instructions that if you have installed any other build, you will not be able to use the armbian builds without an android firmware restore.

Can you run: apt list --installed| grep armbian apt list --installed| grep linux

So yes the emmc isn't detected (there is no mmcblk1). Are you sure you have emmc on the box? (I have for example some TX3 boxes that have old style nand instead of emmc and mainline linux doesn't support nand. TV Box manufacturers will cut costs in anyway possible and nand is cheaper than emmc) You would need open the box and inspect what physical chips are installed. Since I don't have your box, there is little I can do to debug this. Have you looked at the full log of the boot process to look for any indication of issues reported during the boot? (You would need to find the debug serial console pins on the mother board and hook up a usb serial reader to capture the boot messages) (some of this information goes to HDMI, but some gets output before HDMI is initialized).

That isn't a message produced by the install-aml.sh script. What does lsblk output?

@Ian Coelho How about some basic information first. What build are you running? What dtb are you using? What dtbs have you tried? How are you attempting to install to emmc?

Not right at all. Every SBC that has different hardware configuration requires a different dtb file that describes the hardware to the Linux kernel. So every SBC needs it's own build ( sometimes dtb overlays can be used to shortcut this). And similar issues can exist at the uboot level too.

So this dtb is not part of the image? Where are you placing the custom dtb? Do not put it in the dtb directory as that entire directory is removed and replaced on a kernel update. Put it in /boot or a custom subdirectory and adjust the extlinux file accordingly.

Also, what dtb are you using and what uboot.bin file?