SteeMan

Moved post to new topic as this post deals with 64bit cpu but was posted in a thread dealing with 32bit cpus.

As a new user to the TV box forum I want to point you to the following "Please Read First" post: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/16407-please-read-first I have very little familiarity with rockchip based TV boxes, so there isn't much help I can offer. But from what I understand the RK3318 is a poorly supported chip by the manufacturer. Here is the latest thread that I could find in the forums that you could use to get started which has links to a couple of experimental builds: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/16153-rk3318-device-magicsee-n5-nova-4g64g-with-dead-nand

post moved to TV box forum - general chat

@alexx If I understand you correctly, you are currently running with the OS installed on an external drive connected via USB (no sd card and the original android still installed on the internal emmc storage). There isn't any reason you need to change that setup. As a general rule of thumb, SSD better than emmc which is better than SD card, in terms of quality and durability of the storage. So you should be fine running your current setup.

You still didn't answer the question of which build you are using, i.e. what is the full name of the file you downloaded. Also what dtb files did you try, all of the s905x files or only the one you mentioned. By running install-am.sh script you have erased your emmc internal storage and replaced it with a copy of your armbian install from the sd card. So yes your android install is gone. To restore you will need to find an android firmware for your box and use the appropriate tools to reinstall that firmware.

As is stated here: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/16407-please-read-first it shouldn't be an expectation that wifi is going to work with armbian on TV boxes. I have about 8 boxes now and wifi doesn't work on any of them. While there are exceptions, in general if you limit your expectations to using wired ethernet you can do some amazing things with these boxes. Since you didn't even mention which box you are interested in, I can't guess if wifi has a remote possibility of working for you, but my guess is not. There are only a couple of people currently engaged in volunteering their time to respond to users in the TV box forums. So I choose to focus my limited resources on helping users who have a reasonable chance of success (i.e. their expectations are appropriate). Otherwise I could spend all my time trying to help one user try to get wifi working on one poorly supported TV box type and likely be unsuccessful in the end.

@MX10.AC2N I think you are approaching your issue from the wrong perspective. As balbes already mentioned he "doesn't use this software and has no idea what it requires'. So essentially asking the same question in a different way isn't likely to get a different answer. You need to understand that the armbian project is about getting the mainline linux (debian and ubuntu distributions) to run on arm SBCs (and luckily that often works on TV boes as well). Information and support of the thousands of software programs that can then run on debian or ubuntu isn't something that armbian is about. NextCloud is a software product and you want to run that program on your armbian based TV box, which is great, but you should be looking for support from the NextCloud community for support of their product. You mention in your posts NextCloudPI. I'm not sure why you are going down that particular path. You should be able to just install NextCloud following their instructions for your chosen distribution (debian or ubuntu). I have been running nextcloud on one of my amlogic s905w based TX3 mini boxes for over a year using the snap version for my ubuntu bionic install. It was easy to install, it automatically updates itself and I haven't had to think about it in a long time. That is exactly what you want from a server based software program. Now if you ask me what i did over a year ago to get it installed, I will have no recollection, but I just followed the readily available instructions available from nextcloud to get it done - didn't need to post anything to armbian forums to install a generic software product.

I moved the above to a separate thread as the content is distinct from the thread it was originally posted in.

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.