SteeMan
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Posts posted by SteeMan
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@menelike Have you tried to install a clean copy of a build with a mainline kernel to see if that works on you box? My recommendation would be to perform a clean install and then migrate over anything you need from the old 3.x kernel based install. There is no upgrade path for what you are trying to do, so many things have changed overtime that I wouldn't be confident that you will ever end up with a stable environment.
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22 hours ago, aminders said:
I'm working on getting WiFi working
Most of these boxes have a sp6051p wifi chip which doesn't have a supported driver in mainline kernels, so wifi isn't an option.
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@chinhut I created a thread about this topic (failure to reboot sometimes) last week as it seems to be a common issue. IF you have any thoughts to add, please do so in that thread: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/16837-problems-rebooting-amlogic-based-boxes-from-emmc/
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No hardware decoding. Please read: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/16407-please-read-first
You should not be expecting to use TV boxes running armbian for heavy desktop work i.e. video.
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Please read: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/16407-please-read-first
You can run the balbes150 build on an amlogic s905w based X96 mini. Use the October 14, 2020 build and follow the instructions in the first post in this thread:
https://forum.armbian.com/topic/12162-single-armbian-image-for-rk-aml-aw-aarch64-armv8
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The language of this forum is English. Please use a translation tool.
1 hour ago, Fionda 4 said:Salve a tutti, sono nuovo di questo forum e vorrei sapere se ho aqcquistato un prodotto valido e cosa ci si puo fare con x96 mini.
Grazie....Hi everyone, I am new to this forum and I would like to know if I have purchased a valid product and what can be done with x96 mini.
Thanks.... -
theoretically yes. If you search the forum you will find some discussions on this. I don't know how likely you will be to get something displayed. I try to find boxes that don't have a display as from my perspective it is a waste of components that have very little practical value when running a linux distribution.
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On 1/20/2021 at 3:49 AM, lgranie said:
- format /boot in ext4
A couple of thoughts/questions on this. First why do you want to do this? I understand some of the limitations of having /boot be on a fat filesystem, but is there some specific thing you need this for?
Second, this is likely not going to be easy as the amlogic TV box booting process is tied to the fact that /boot is on a fat partition. If you look at aml_autoscript, s905_autoscript, emmc_autoscript they are coded with /boot being on a fat filesystem (i.e. using 'fatload'). If your goal is to get the standard armbian kernels to install cleanly on a /boot fat filesystem, then it may be easier to get armbian fixed. Theoretically armbian supports /boot on a fat file system (there is code in the scripts to allow that), but it likely isn't tested much.
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Note: @lgranie reported success in using standard armbian kernels (https://forum.armbian.com/topic/16845-efforts-to-improve-video-performance-on-meson64-based-tv-boxes/?tab=comments#comment-117863)
and he is now moving forward with testing video performance improvements on the new kernels
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This thread originally started under a topic about upgrading the kernel from a balbes image kernel to an armbian standard meson64 kernel. The goal of @lgranie in that topic was to be able to access more current kernels to take advantage of improvements. The balbes images stopped supporting amlogic devices on 2020-10-14 at kernel version 5.9.0 and he was looking for an upgrade path.
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@lcapriotti Very interesting. My TX3 X3 is also the same board version as yours, which explains why I have never been successful in trying these alternate dtb files. I never dug into what was going wrong, and this helps explain it.
I have been running my TX3 X3 (BZ version) using meson-sm1-sei610.dtb. I have 100mbit ethernet working but no internal wifi. So since you mention you have an external usb wifi, this might be a path to consider, using this dtb and forgoing the internal wifi.
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6 hours ago, lcapriotti said:
TX3 first version (BZ, 100Mb eth), no luck with eth with these DTBs.
I will keep on trying..
You need to provide more information if you wish to get help. What to you mean by 'TX3 first version'? What dtbs have you tried? Are you able to boot and have everything working except ethernet or are you having issues getting armbian to boot at all?
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@jock Thanks for your comments. I will certainly reach out to you before I do anything with your threads (like moving them to a different sub-forum, etc). What you are doing seems to be working well for the users you are supporting, and I don't want to break what works.
The support issues generally are on the amlogic side of things right now. Since there is no active development support for builds for amlogic based TV boxes after balbes stopped supporting them. The additional problem is that the majority of TV boxes produced seem to contain amlogic cpus (although rockchip seems to be changing that recently). So the volume of users on the amlogic side is higher than allwinner and rockchip at the moment. And as you point out the various china clones of varying quality tend to be amlogic based.
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@ballerburg9005 I just wanted to add a few of my own thoughts to this thread. Overall I can see both sides to the above discussion. There are valid points made by everyone commenting. While we all sometimes need to have 'grand visions' of the future we would like to work towards, we also have to deal with the reality of where we currently are. I often think of a saying "crawl, walk, run". While we all want to be running to the finish line of an Olympic race, we all start by crawling first. As that relates to armbian and more specifically armbian on TV boxes, we are at the crawling stage. There is a lot of work to be done to just get us walking. That doesn't mean that crawling and walking in themselves aren't valid and productive stages (they are and you can use a lot of different TV boxes today to do a lot of productive stuff).
There is a lot of work to be done today to improve our crawling. We need volunteers (like you) to pick up that work if we ever hope to get further along our path. We need to build a community one volunteer at a time. While visions are important, if we don't have people willing to do work today then we will never more forward.
If you hang around armbian for any extended period of time, you will learn that the single thing that most bothers the core maintainers of the project are people having grand visions or even small visions of what should be done but who don't contribute any time to help and expect others to do the work for them.
Whether intentional or not, that is how your post came across to Igor and Balbes and they reacted as they normally do to such posts.
If you want to run to the finish line with your vision, you need to start by crawling. Spend time on these forums following the issues to build your knowledge. Help support new users to allow others with the technical knowledge time to work on development and progress on our shared goals. This all doesn't happen overnight.
I welcome your contributions to the efforts here, but starting off by getting into a disagreement with two of the core maintainers isn't likely the best way to have started. Overtime you will realize we all share a lot of the same goals and can work together even through we have different personalities and sometimes have to overcome language/cultural differences.
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2 hours ago, sfs said:
DTB file used: meson-sm1-sei610-ethfix.dtb
@sfs This is not a valid submission. The dtb you reference is not part of the distribution. So a new user couldn't follow the general installation instructions and get your results. As was mentioned in the instructions, you need to only use files from the distribution. You can add comments about how other settings/dtbs/tweeks improved your installation. Also if you are referencing external code, I would request that you also include or link to source code not the compiled objects (i.e. dts vs. dtb). That way in the future someone may be able to maintain this addon/feature as changes to the underlying kernel/environment require.
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This issue is specifically about an issue where 'sometimes' a box will fail to boot off of emmc (after having booted successfully previously). The workaround is to boot once from SD card and then the emmc boot generally works fine again.
I am starting this thread as a central place to discuss this issue that has been reported by a few people that I know. @lgranie and @robertoenr both have reported this problem either recently or in the past and I see it myself frequently.
It would appear that something is getting set in the uboot environment that is causing the boots to fail and fixed/cleared by a boot from SD card.
I haven't had time to look at this and don't know when/if I will have time. But I wanted to log this so others would know about the issue and perhaps someone might have time to dig into this.
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@lgranie Thank you for your efforts. I'm glad to hear about your progress. Now I have more things to try and test.
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I tried this upgrade a few months back on a test system just to see what would happen and for the most part it worked just fine, with the exception of the kernel.
The ubuntu upgrade went along without any errors and did it's thing. Then after the upgrade I was prompted to remove obsolete packages. I did this before I realized that the kernel was considered an obsolete package. So apt went merrily on and removed all obsolete packages including the kernel. Fortunately I realized this before I rebooted. While I am fuzzy on the details, I believe the issue was that there isn't any part of the ubuntu upgrade that updates /etc/apt/sources.list.d/armbian.list . So after the upgrade this file still points to old repositories (i.e. bionic instead of focal). I think I just edited this file, reinstalled the kernel package and everything was fine. I didn't do much if any testing after the upgrade, it was just a test to see if this was at all possible.
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I have begun to make some changes to the TV Box 'Club' area.
The overall goal is to provide more useful information to users and reduce the support workload of answering the same questions over and over again.
To that end there is now a FAQ forum on the menu. While it is currently empty and just a place holder it should provide a centralized location for TV Box information over time.
The second new addition is the forum titled 'TV Boxes running Armbian'. The idea here is to provide a maintained list of current information with links to the details for boxes reported by the community to be successfully running armbian.
Both of the two above forums will likely be strictly moderated to keep the information concise and on topic. I don't want these to become mega threads (like some of the TV box threads tend to be). Content that gets posted here that belongs elsewhere will be moved.
I'm still trying to figure out how the rest of the area should be organized. There needs to be a place for newbies to ask questions and it would be nice if there was a place for developers to share information. The problem is that the current mega threads for the Rockchip CSC builds do that in a single thread, vs using one or more forums for that. Also I wonder if there should be different forums by CPU family (AML,RK,AW?) by developer build (Balbes vs Jock's CSC builds?). Any suggestions on how others think things should be organized?
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TV Box Status Information Template Version 1.0
TV Box Name (example: TX3 mini): X96 mini
CPU (example: amlogic s905w): amlogic s905w
Armbian build file name: Armbian_20.10_Arm-64_focal_current_5.9.0_desktop.img.xz
DTB file used: meson-gxl-s905w-gxl-s905w-p281.dtb
Kernel Version: 5.9.0
Distribution Installed (focal, buster, etc): focal
Working Ethernet (Yes/No): Yes
Max Ethernet Speed that works (100/1000): 100
Does wifi work (Yes/No): No
Does bluetooth work (Yes/No): No
Does HDMI audio work (Yes/No): No
Additional Comments (provide any additional information you feel is important): HDMI was unstable during boot and when connected to a 4K monitor. Once I connected to a 1080p monitor the display was stable after booting, still had issues during the boot.
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The following template should be used to report a working TV Box running Armbian. The purpose of this template is to gather consistent and complete information.
To submit a report of a working TV Box start a new topic in this sub-forum with the name of the TV box as the title and copy/paste this template into the post and provide the requested information.
Note: Only report status using dtb files that are part of the image and therefore available to all users from a standard source. If you have used another dtb file, please mention that in the comments along with where the source code for the dtb is located and what the custom dtb improved.
Note: You will need to install/enable a desktop environment to gather all of the below information (i.e. hdmi audio)
TV Box Status Information Template Version 1.0
TV Box Name (example: TX3 mini):
CPU (example: amlogic s905w):
Armbian build file name:
DTB file used:
Kernel Version:
Distribution Installed (focal, buster, etc):
Working Ethernet (Yes/No):
Max Ethernet Speed that works (100/1000):
Does wifi work (Yes/No):
Does bluetooth work (Yes/No):
Does HDMI audio work (Yes/No):
Additional Comments (provide any additional information you feel is important):
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As is stated in https://forum.armbian.com/topic/16407-please-read-first
which I linked to earlier:
"7. You really shouldn't expect things like Wi-Fi, bluetooth, remote control, etc. to work."
I have six different amlogic based TV boxes and wifi doesn't work on any of them. If you really need wifi your best bet is to use a usb wifi adaptor. Otherwise you can try different dtb files compatible with your cpu and see if you can find a better fit for your hardware or search the forums for others that have the same box as you and see if anyone has reported success in getting wifi working on a mainline kernel on your specific box. Since I don't have your box, I can't provide any more guidance than that.
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9 minutes ago, peppezic said:
I was using Armbian_20.10_Arm-64_bionic_current_5.9.0.
To your original question, you are not seeing desktop support because you have installed a server build with no desktop support. You need to install a build that has 'desktop' in the file name to have desktop support. In the last set of builds from balbes that includes amlogic support you have the following two desktop builds:
Armbian_20.10_Arm-64_bullseye_current_5.9.0_desktop.img.xz
Armbian_20.10_Arm-64_focal_current_5.9.0_desktop.img.xz(note no bionic desktop build)
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@riocoles Please read https://forum.armbian.com/topic/16407-please-read-first
especially note the current status of amlogic cpus which is what your box contains.
Have you tried different dtb files? You are using a dtb file that isn't part of the mainline kernel (thus it is a patch applied to mainline kernel). It could be the case that due to changes in mainline over time that the patch hasn't been well maintained and no longer works correctly. When dealing with TV boxes sometimes the best advise is to try all the relevant dtb files for your cpu to see which has the best support for the physical hardware in your specific box.
Armbian for Tanix TX3 Amlogic S905X3 with SP6330 WiFi/Bluetooth module
in Amlogic CPU Boxes
Posted
@lcapriotti My TX3 X3 (BZ version) using meson-sm1-sei610.dtb successfully is shutting down on 'shutdown -h now' and poweroff, and is correctly rebooting on reboot when I tested this morning. I know that sometimes it fails to reboot, but it was cooperating this morning.