SteeMan

As I mentioned I was having problems using the chainloaded u-boots for s905x2 and s905x3 based boxes in loading 5.10 kernels (5.9 and earlier kernels have been working find). I had a little time this past weekend and I was able to successfully boot a 5.10 kernel using your u-boot mentioned above in place of the one in balbes image for s905x2. I was also able to do the same with a s905x3 box (boot a 5.10 kernel) but on this one ethernet didn't work. I didn't have time to investigate anything beyond getting successful boots.

I moved this to its own thread.

As a new user, have you read: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/16407-please-read-first You haven't told us how you installed your system. Lets start with some basics: what build did you use?

I build my own from mainline kernel sources. Since I only am using this for server tasks, I can use pure mainline kernel without the need for any additional patches for my needs.

From the instructions: "The start system in Coreelec is not compatible with LibreELECE Armbian etc. If you run coreelec on your TV box, you will no longer be able to run LE and Armbian normally until the full recovery of the standard firmware via the USB Burn Tool and the new activation of the universal multi-boot, which is used in all new systems."

Moved you post to the TV Box club. You should read: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/16407-please-read-first Generally you are not going to find any Android TV boxes that will meet your needs with the armbian builds that you can install on them currently. They were great for headless servers, or light desktop/browser use. But you aren't going to find good video playback support currently in general and especially not at the price point you are looking at. Just trying to set your expectations. If you already had a box and wanted to experiment, I would say go ahead, but if you haven't yet bought something, you are likely going to be disappointed by the current state of armbian on TV boxes - the first clue to that state is that they aren't supported devices.

Yes you can use ext3/4 filesystems if you want. The reason the balbes images use fat partitions for /boot is because of the necessity to edit the config files for the dtb. Many users only have windows/mac os systems and therefore it was decided that the ease of being able to pop in the SD card into any machine regardless of OS and edit the config file (due to the universal support of the fat filesystem) to set the appropriate dtb was desirable.

@hannah You have a lot to learn about armbian on TV boxes and dtbs and kernels. I plan to write a longer response this weekend when I have more time, but for now the short answer to your most specific question: no audio over hdmi is that you need to use a different dtb file. Your box is s905x3 based (i.e. the sm1 architecture). You are using based on what you reported a dtb for the s905x2 (g12a). While much is the same, some things are also different. Now what you may find is that if you use one of the very few available sm1 dtbs (I use and have only tested meson-sm1-sei610.dtb - the sei610 is the reference board for the s905x3 chip) that other things you have working on your current install (like wifi) will probably no longer work. I believe you have likely already read the following: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/16407-please-read-first as it was referenced in the last thread you started. The current state for armbian on TV boxes is limited especially for amlogic cpus. There are many reasons for this and that deserves a longer explaination of how dtbs and kernels interact and the overall goals of the armbian project. (and how they differ from other projects out there like coreelec you reference above). But I have already spent an hour of my day (we are all volunteers around here) setting up a test system to verify that audio does indeed work on a TX3 X3 box (as I thought it did, but because I don't normally run desktop environments as the current state of support really isn't working well yet, I didn't have an environment I could quickly test). What I did just do is downloaded a clean copy of the 2020-10-14 balbes build of focal 5.9.0 desktop, used the meson-sm1-sei610.dtb and the u-boot-s905x2-s922 uboot file copied to u-boot.ext, booted and played the test.mp4 file and had correctly working audio via hdmi. I then changed the dtb to meson-g12a-x96-max.dtb, which I believe you are using, rebooted and had no audio. What I don't understand is that if you have read the Please Read First post, why you would post four posts in this thread within a day, seemingly demanding support for the 2 or 3 volunteers around here that monitor this forum? Especially when you are asking about things like bluetooth, wifi, etc on the amlogic platform that we say you shouldn't expect to work, and if they do you are lucky.

@robertoenr I have seen issues similar to what you are reporting (poweroff does a reboot) on some boxes. I haven' had time to investigate as it isn't a big issue for me. But what I recently noticed was that on some boxes while 'sudo poweroff' does a reboot, using 'sudo reboot' will actually poweroff the unit. On your other issue, with the system not being able to restart sometimes, the workaround I have found is to have a spare SD card around that is configured for the device. When the box doesn't boot from emmc, my experience is that it will boot from an SD card. And after one successful boot from the SD card, it will again correctly boot from emmc, which is a lot easier than reflashing and starting over. I'd be curious if your box behaves the same way as mine does.

@hexdump I have been planning to reach out to you to pick your brain. I noticed that in the last balbes build which supports amlogic that the chainloaded s905x u-boot was from your work. (Which happens to be the one environment that that is working on 5.10 for me). I will definitely experiment with what you have as I really want to move all of my boxes to 5.10 as an LTS kernel that includes wireguard support natively.

The short answer is maybe. Your question got me to experimenting a bit this morning and I was successful in getting a box (TX3 mini in my case) to boot from a current armbian meson64 kernel (5.9.14). My box is amlogic s905w, where yours I believe is s905x2. I had been wanting to try this for a while, but hadn't had time/reason to do it, but your question led me to give it a try. If you are running from an SD card there is no reason not to experiment as you can always easily start over if you can't boot. Here are the steps I did: 1) backup old kernel files in case things go wrong: cd /boot sudo cp uInitird uInitrd-5.9.0 sudo cp zImage zImage-5.9.0 sudo cp -r dtb dtb-5.9.0 # if things fail you can pop the sd card into another box and revert these 2) edit extlinux.conf change the "LINUX /zImage" line to "LINUX /Image" #there is different kernel file naming between balbes images and armbian kernels, Image is what I found in the kernel I installed, but different packages may have different names so adjust accordingly. If you need to revert to the old kernel you will need to undo this change as well. 3) Install the new kernel package, I used: sudo apt install linux-image-current-meson64 #the installation errored at the end and I didn't bother to figure out why (although from past experience it is likely to have to do with the fact that balbes uses fat partitions for boot, whereas standard armbian uses ext4 partitions). But at the point it errors everything is installed in /boot that is needed which is why I didn't investigate further at the current time. 4) reboot and cross your fingers This is both true and untrue. The standard armbian kernels are heavily patched as they are trying to incorporate a lot of fixes and drivers to get a wide range of SBC boards working as completely as possible. But if all you need is a basic environment that boots with hdmi and ethernet you can use a mainline kernel with hardly any patches on a lot of TV boxes (which is what I normally do). I also want to mention something that I was working on over the weekend that you should be aware of. As it relates to s905x2 and/or s905x3 support and 5.10 kernels. I haven't been able to boot my TV boxes running these cpus on 5.10 kernels. I can boot my s905w boxes on 5.10 however. I think there is an issue with the u-boots that balbes included for the x2/x3 cpus that are having issues with the changes in the 5.10 kernel. Someday I hope to dig into this further, but for now I am running those boxes on the 5.4 mainline LTS kernels as it will give me bug/security fixes for a few more years which will give me or someone else time to investigate the issue in the future.

I have installed freepbx on ubuntu/armbian in the past using the instrustions found on the freepbx wiki like the ones you linked to for debian above. I didn't run into any issues specific to armbian. This isn't really an armbian question and more appropriate for a freepbx forum. In looking at the freepbx forum I see you have already asked the same question over there and got the answer: google it, which from the above post you did, and found the answer.

This recent thread also for the TX3 should have all the information you need. https://forum.armbian.com/topic/15950-can-not-find-image-to-download-for-tx3-mini/

@SimonHayterUK FYI. Balbes150 announced that he is no longer supporting Amlogic cpus in his work for builds after 10/14/2020. While I do realize that he has builds labeled s812 after that date, I can't confirm that these work or will see any additional progress. Also as of October Balbes150 is no longer providing end user support through the TV Box forums. You might have better luck finding some older builds and following instructions for older builds from the forum archives for your box.

Interesting history. To get any further on this I am going to recommend that you need to be able to see the boot loader messages on the serial console. Which would entail identifying the proper pins on the board and connecting a serial terminal to them.

@horiatm welcome to armbian and the TV box club. Since this is your first post, I want to point you to the 'Please Read First' post: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/16407-please-read-first I have never heard of your box before. In doing some searching, I don't see anyone ever posting about it in the armbian forums either. Actually I can't find much information at all about the box. Therefore it is unlikely that anyone around here is going to own one or have any direct experience with it. Therefore while we might be able to give you some general guidance, you are likely on your own trying to hack armbian onto your box. If you are looking for help, more information would be helpful. Like where are you downloading the images you are trying from? What steps/instructions are you using to attempt to get this working. Simply saying 'Tried to boot..' doesn't give us much to go on. Things like what dtb's you have tried (and how) would be helpful.

If you installed altlinux why are you asking for help in an armbian forum? I'm not understanding your question.

@shacodelico as was explained earlier in this thread support for the H616 cpu is experimental. Also TV boxes in general are not supported. So you are asking how to run a build that is experimental on a different unsupported box than the build is intended for. If you want to go down this path then the expectation is that you have the skills to be building u-boot and kernels and hacking this together. If that isn't your skill level then this isn't a path that you should be going down. If you do have those skills then we welcome your contributions to the project. But because you are working with an unsupported device don't expect much help in your efforts as the resources around here are spread thin just supported the supported sbcs. Also, if you haven't already please read this post

I'm glad to hear you have armbian installed and running. However you shouldn't expect that the audio jack is going to work. See: Having said that, have you tried choosing different audio sources in pulseaudio? I have only ever used audio over hdmi, so I really don't know if this will work or not.

I don't have that box, but I would try different dtb files. I have a TX3 X3 box and I use the meson-sm1-sei610.dtb which is part of the distribution.

Please read the post 'Please Read First' for expectations around what to expect on the TV Box forums. As it relates to your question, please do not expect to get wifi working on your TV Box.

I'm glad you were able to get armbian running. You should not however expect that you will be able to get the analog audio jack to work. Along with wifi/bluetooth it is highly unlikely that anything other than audio over hdmi is going to work on a TV box like this. If you haven't already, please read the "Please Read First" post to familiarize yourself with what you can hope will work.

@robertoenr What you need is a correctly configured dtb file that maps the actual hardware you have to the kernel so that the kernel can pick up the correct drivers. Such a file likely doesn't exist (unless someone has created one that works already). In reality every tv box board has slightly different hardware and thus needs to have a different dtb file to function properly. But since the board manufacturers don't support mainline linux, no such dtb files exist. So we just use one of the standard dtb files that is close enough. So you get most but not all functionality working. It is beyond the ability/resources of the people around here to create dtbs for every tv box without any information about how they are designed/manufactured. This is why you only get basic functionality when using armbian on tv boxes (basic hdmi, cpu, memory, usb, sdcard, ethernet) as that is pretty standard, where other things like wifi, bluetooth often different on every board or utilize chips that aren't supported in mainline linux.

I wish I had some great insight into your problem. It is interesting that you seem to have a much newer board revision that probably the rest of us that have a box similar to this. That certainly could be the problem. I would also recommend looking at the suggestion just posted by @eddy_c about using the android update app method. The only other suggestion I would have is to try different amounts of time holding the reset button while booting (vary from one second up to 10 seconds to see if that makes a difference), as that is something I have noticed before in getting a successful multi boot, getting the timing right on the reset. I am waiting for a new tx3 mini to come in the mail (hopefully soon), so depending on what board revision I get, maybe I'll be able to reproduce your issue.

I don't have working wifi on any tv box I own. That is why I always stress not to expect to be able to use the on board wifi. If you need wifi, a cheap linux supported usb wifi dongle should work just fine.