jeanrhum

Funny thing is, I haven't seen any outrage about HK using startup protection on "foreign" hardware in its u-boot, which causes the firmware in the device to be destroyed if it's not HK hardware. Where are you defenders of freedom ? I have long seen that most of all squeal about the violation of rights of those who themselves are engaged in theft and piracy, that would hide behind the freedom of their personal dirty deeds to get their personal benefits at someone else's expense. Yes, I warn all fans of freebies in advance that they would not try to hack and try to run my future versions, which will be designed for specific supported models, on their unsupported hardware and for all the consequences of disrupting the operation of their devices, they will be to blame themselves.

Technically Balbes never supported the s905x3. But it is true that he is now ending support of all amlogic cpus.  I already make my own kernel builds, and since I own a few different amlogic based boxes, I have an interest in seeing support continue in some form.  I have asked balbes in another thread if he would tag his public github repositories with a tag that corresponds to his last build supporting amlogic, which then can be a starting point for continued support by the community if there is enough interest.

Now you can download the latest versions of images and DEB packages from the official Armbian resource via the link. 
 
https://users.armbian.com/balbes150/

Good news. Now you can download the latest versions of images and DEB packages from the official Armbian resource via the link. 
 
https://users.armbian.com/balbes150/

You have an error in your extlinux.conf: you should comment the rk3399 lines and uncomment 1 line of amlogic starting with fdt and the last one starting with append.
Here is the one I use for s912 boxes (you may change the dtb if the generic q200 is not relevant):
And you may also change the extlinux.conf-menu file:
 

For less than 100$ you can go with Odroid N2/N2+ which is plenty powerful, but as already suggested float around properly supported SBCs and find one that best suits your need.
 
Expensive tvboxes from known vendors usually are good quality, but I would not suggest to buy them to do server jobs.
IMHO SBCs are a couple of notches superior for build quality, support and warranty, tv boxes are for toying around mostly

This information is already outdated and does not correspond to the current market situation.
 
Make a mistake, rk3399 now has one of the best support in the main kernel (not to be confused with specific models of SbS or TV boxes, chip support and ready-made device support are not the same).
 
 

v20.08.1
Due to several - mainly small - problems in last build we are considering pushing out a smaller bug fix release.
 
- fixes that are merged in next 7 days (due = September 4th)
- all images will be rebuild
- an update will go out

H3 is very well supported in armbian and linux mainline, but I don't know if there is a NAND driver actually.
The choice of the box vastly depends on what you need to do and how much horsepower you need with that one.
If you want to be sure you get what you actually want, buy a proper SBC with eMMC and a case.
Hardware of tv boxes, expecially cheap ones, is always a lottery, as you already experienced by yourself.

I tested your newest debian server on my x96 mini with s905w dtb and it works well!
 
I was also able to install a desktop environment with armbian-config.
As expected wifi and bluetooth are not detected. It should require some specific firmware (armbian-firmware installed) but I had not open my box to see the chip.
I also saw a problem with zram service not working.

Ethernet works: http://ix.io/2pla
 

The new version 20200609. In it, I switched to using the u-boot version 2020.04 (source shared with universal images for aarch64). This version has long implemented the function of starting the system from USB media. Now rk3288 also has the option to start the system from USB media. Minimal Bionic and Buster images have also been added to the site.
 
Starting from USB is available on both systems (Libreelec and Armbian). For example. You can write to an Armbian SD card, and write to a Libreelec USB flash drive. When you connect both media, LE will work, and when you disable the USB flash drive, Armbian starts.
 
 
p.s. The correct installation of these systems in eMMC is currently being tested.

Hello anyone!
I'm proud to announce the Multitool RK3288 edition!
 
It's a small but powerful tool to easy operate on internal eMMC flash of RK3288 devices.
 
Features:
Backup the content of internal eMMC Restore a previously backed-up image to eMMC Erase the eMMC (via fast blkdiscard or zero-fill as fallback) Burn an Armbian (or LibreELEC) image directly on the eMMC Provide a recovery shell for manual maintenance Windows-friendly: everything is placed in a FAT partition Image compression format autodetection: they are decompressed on-the-fly during burn process Instructions are simple:
Download the image from here Burn it on an sdcard Open the FAT partition with your preferred file manager Place the images you want to burn on the device in images directory (backups will be stored in backups directory) Plug the sd card in the RK3288 device Power the device and wait few seconds, the Multitool menu will appear on screen and can be navigated with the keyboard At the moment it has been tested only on my xt-q8l-v10 device, but any test, feedback and suggestion is welcome!
 

First test with ugoos ut3s with default dtb (firefly-reload): http://ix.io/2o7o
For information, I have jock uboot and an old Q8 image installed on emmc.
Wifi works, but ethernet seems buggy like on recent arm64 images (kernel 5.X pb with current dtbs ?). I didn't test it, but the connection was activated whereas no cable... System halts instead of reboot.
Bluetooth seems not working well (xfce applet disappear when I try to use it to activate)
With Q8 dtb the experience seems similar from a user perspective: http://ix.io/2o7q
With popmetal and tinker dtb, the system does not boot: waiting root file system... running /scripts/local-block
With miqi dtb, it boots, but without wifi and I was not able to connect a cable to test the wired network, but eth0 still shows as connected.
 
Edit: As I noticed on Jock images, the Q8 dtb is not able to detect emmc on contrary to firefly-reload.

And there are a number of important differences between ArmbianTV and the official versions. For example, there are two sections. The first boot partition is necessarily made available for any PC (Windows Linux MAC etc), in particular it uses FAT. This is crucial. This allows any user, on any device, to easily configure system startup for their device. In case of problems with startup, it can connect the media to any PC and easily edit startup parameters, enable new options, change settings, add/delete files, etc. With official versions, this is not possible on a Windows PC, which greatly narrows the circle of users who want to start using Linux (Armbian). The official versions also use oters technologies. Installation in eMMC using direct bitwise copying of the source system (via DD).  use of the UUID, etc.
Please note that I do not impose anything on anyone or criticize the official version. I'm just stating the differences. Developers of the official version decide what to do and what to use.

Images with two kernel versions are available for testing.
Legacy.
Uses the 5.4 core built using source code and patches (with minor fixes) that are used to build the rockchip.
 
DEV.
The core 5.7-rc7 is used (the sources are shared with the version I use to build aarhc64 images).
 
There are no patches in this version yet. The legacy version has almost all the working hardware on UM3. On the DEV version, not everything works, but there is access to eMMC. how it is used (the setting for running is the same as the aarch64 version of images). To configure dtb, use the file (uEnv.txt). At this stage, I used settings and patches from MIQI to build the u-boot. I tried the u-boot version from Q8, it works the same way, but I haven't decided which version is better to use yet (I haven't fully figured out what the pros and cons of these u-boot versions are).
 
The link to the images and the launch order will be placed in the first message.

I opened this theme to support running ArmbianTV on 32-bit ARM models. To date, there are first results on launching ArmbianTV on the Rockchip rk3288 and AML s8xx platform (in the future, by analogy with aarch64, I plan to switch to a common image for all 32-bit models of TV boxes).
 
 
 
The link to the images
https://yadi.sk/d/85ZvBuXyyenf_A
 
 
MEGA (name -rk3288)
https://mega.nz/#F!j9QSDQSQ!6WpasOlbZYIInfw6yo4phQ
 
Now you can download the latest versions of images and DEB packages from the official Armbian resource via the link. 
https://users.armbian.com/balbes150/
 
 
Recommended startup procedure on UM3.
 
1. Install the Linux firmware version in eMMC (either a dual boot or a single Linux).
2. follow these instructions to download and run the Linux version from linuxium
 
https://forum.freaktab.com/forum/tv-player-support/rk3288-devices/21091-use-windows-to-create-an-sd-card-so-you-can-run-linux-on-a-rk3288-device
 
(do not forget to immediately expand the system partition to the entire media after writing the image). After launch, make a full backup eMMC with the DD command (or copy the ddbr utility to the system and use it).
3. Erase the first 4Mb on eMMC (using a simple DD command).
4. Download, unpack and burn the ArmbianTV image to your SD card.
5. Connect to the TV box and turn on the power. The system will start automatically.
 
For those who are not afraid to lose their regular firmware and be able to easily restore it later, you can use the "accelerated" launch option (erase eMMC use the tools for Rockchip TV boxes). 
 

One suggestion is to forget about this WiFi chip and use a USB chip.
 
 

The new version 20.05.5 (20200522).
All images are build entirely on the ARM platform (rk3399 + NVMe). After fixing bugs, the process of building the first image (including downloading sources, building all packages, building the kernel, u-boot, and so on) took less than 50 minutes. 

@Armin
if you need just something such small, you may find nanopi or orange pi boards. Some small models are pretty cheap (<10$) and well supported by armbian. Tv boxes have no exposed GPIOs, which can instead be very useful for domotic applications.
For example, I have an old Orange PI One (Allwinner H3) which has ethernet, 1 USB port, 512mb of ram and some exposed GPIO. I paid less than 10$ some year ago. I guess now you can get something similar with wifi too at the same price.

No SPI - is very bad. Use an SD card (speed 50) or eMMC (speed 125) , if you have USB 3 (speed 340), to work - you need to be an idiot. At the same time, u-boot placement is possible only on SD\eMMC\SPI and therefore for the system to work with USB, you will have to have either an SD card (all SD cards are complete crap in speed and reliability and I generally consider them only as temporary media , such as CD\DVD on a PC), or buy an expensive branded EMMC module (almost 15$ for 8Gb), just for the sake of starting the system from USB. HK needs to be added before mass release SPI (only 4Mb is enough) and make it the main carrier for u-boot placement.

The version of the image 20200323.
Resolved then issue of pulseadio conflict with the G12 audio device . Now you don 't need to delete PULSEAUDIO. To enable audio on g12, you only need to run the script (g12_sound.sh) or for GX\GXM models, run the script (gx_sound.sh).

These are debian and ubuntu release names. Prefer buster if you want debian or bionic for ubuntu.

Hi,
I tested several sbcs:
- buster image for pine64: http://ix.io/2bMQ
- buster image for OPi+2E: http://ix.io/2bMU
- buster image for pineh64-b (wlan0 visible, but not able to connect to my wifi network): http://ix.io/2bN0

Currently amlogic s922x or A311D are the most powerful socs (4xA73). The first one can be found some tvbox like beelink gt king or ugoos am6 and the second one in khadas vim3.
I think that most rk3399 boards have better supported than amlogic ones.
 
For your second question, it mainly depend on your use case.