Bozza

Balbes has stopped supporting the s905x3. We will need to compile it ourselves.
 
Who would like to compile it with me? Is anyone interested? Can I have a show of hands? 

Balbes has stopped supporting the s905x3. We will need to compile it ourselves.
 
Who would like to compile it with me? Is anyone interested? Can I have a show of hands? 

Balbes has stopped supporting the s905x3. We will need to compile it ourselves.
 
Who would like to compile it with me? Is anyone interested? Can I have a show of hands? 

Call to Action: Armbian donation round.
 
Dear members of the community, 
 
Do you love the armbian OS? 
Are you frustrated by bugs or problems within armbian? 
Do you wish that armbian was even better with more releases? 
 
If the answer is yes keep reading because there may be a solution. 
 
As you know the dedicated team of developers here code this project in their spare time to develop an incredible Linux OS for our ARM devices. They do this for the love of this hobby and we all benefit from it because it is an open source project.
 
One of the hurdles is the fast compiling of the armbian OS. To solve this issue the developers are looking to purchase or rent an 80 core ARM build server. This will improve compilation times and therefore the workflow of the developers. It will mean that they can develop at a much faster pace and more importantly diagnose problems, optimize code and iron out bugs a lot more effectively and efficiently.
 
The developers are currently considering the Ampere Altra. 
 
https://www.anandtech.com/show/15949/ampere-altra-1p-server-pictured-gigabytes-2u-with-80-arm-n1-cores-pcie-40-and-ccix
 
To make this a reality I, on behalf of the development team, am asking for everybody to chip in. If everybody donates just a little bit the developers will be able to get this server and develop the armbian software that we all love so much.
 
What are you waiting for? 
 
Hit subscribe in the menu of the forum. Every major payment method is accepted.

Memory installed.
 

Boot SATA DOM installed. Let someone double check if polarity is correct even its hard to make it wrong  
 

There is something important I should add. I am sure big corporations can easily contribute money to meet the demand goal, however this is a community project and it is therefore imperative that we as individuals contribute to the project. 
 
If only big corporations contribute they will probably want to have a say in what direction the project develops which could lead to only a small fraction of devices being developed for or it could lead to a situation where they ask that only their devices are prioritised.
 
If you want that a wider range of devices are going to be worked on it is important that we also contribute, even if we just donate small amounts. At the end of the day there are a lot of us who have an interest in running armbian on our devices.
 
Essentially we have to be fast and donate faster than the companies who only have a commercial interest! 
 
If you are not able to donate there are also other ways to contribute towards the project. Writing documentation, translating documentation, programming and even fan artwork is important (desktop background images, forum banners, forum signatures and other artwork). 
 
Do you love armbian as much as I do? 
 
Don't wait and contribute to the project now by any means you wish! 
 
 

There is something important I should add. I am sure big corporations can easily contribute money to meet the demand goal, however this is a community project and it is therefore imperative that we as individuals contribute to the project. 
 
If only big corporations contribute they will probably want to have a say in what direction the project develops which could lead to only a small fraction of devices being developed for or it could lead to a situation where they ask that only their devices are prioritised.
 
If you want that a wider range of devices are going to be worked on it is important that we also contribute, even if we just donate small amounts. At the end of the day there are a lot of us who have an interest in running armbian on our devices.
 
Essentially we have to be fast and donate faster than the companies who only have a commercial interest! 
 
If you are not able to donate there are also other ways to contribute towards the project. Writing documentation, translating documentation, programming and even fan artwork is important (desktop background images, forum banners, forum signatures and other artwork). 
 
Do you love armbian as much as I do? 
 
Don't wait and contribute to the project now by any means you wish! 
 
 

There is something important I should add. I am sure big corporations can easily contribute money to meet the demand goal, however this is a community project and it is therefore imperative that we as individuals contribute to the project. 
 
If only big corporations contribute they will probably want to have a say in what direction the project develops which could lead to only a small fraction of devices being developed for or it could lead to a situation where they ask that only their devices are prioritised.
 
If you want that a wider range of devices are going to be worked on it is important that we also contribute, even if we just donate small amounts. At the end of the day there are a lot of us who have an interest in running armbian on our devices.
 
Essentially we have to be fast and donate faster than the companies who only have a commercial interest! 
 
If you are not able to donate there are also other ways to contribute towards the project. Writing documentation, translating documentation, programming and even fan artwork is important (desktop background images, forum banners, forum signatures and other artwork). 
 
Do you love armbian as much as I do? 
 
Don't wait and contribute to the project now by any means you wish! 
 
 

There is something important I should add. I am sure big corporations can easily contribute money to meet the demand goal, however this is a community project and it is therefore imperative that we as individuals contribute to the project. 
 
If only big corporations contribute they will probably want to have a say in what direction the project develops which could lead to only a small fraction of devices being developed for or it could lead to a situation where they ask that only their devices are prioritised.
 
If you want that a wider range of devices are going to be worked on it is important that we also contribute, even if we just donate small amounts. At the end of the day there are a lot of us who have an interest in running armbian on our devices.
 
Essentially we have to be fast and donate faster than the companies who only have a commercial interest! 
 
If you are not able to donate there are also other ways to contribute towards the project. Writing documentation, translating documentation, programming and even fan artwork is important (desktop background images, forum banners, forum signatures and other artwork). 
 
Do you love armbian as much as I do? 
 
Don't wait and contribute to the project now by any means you wish! 
 
 

At least people that work on development can mitigate this frustration when catching the bug or fixing the problem.
 
 
We just got ARM64 server on our hand as a donation from:
 


https://www.worksonarm.com/
https://github.com/WorksOnArm/cluster
 
but it will only be available for limited time and before we can use it in production, we need to port our build system to support native building, test and then start using it in production. 
 
 
Fastest build server we will need to purchase - we still need a major CPU upgrade on cross compilation server. Something in range of Threadripper 3970x / 3990x + board + pci4 ssd in raid0 + 128GB memory which will costs us ∼6000 EUR.
 
Our current aging 5 years old Dual Xeon E5-2683 build/CI server was also purchased with help from community and I hope we will also receive help!

Call to Action: Armbian donation round.
 
Dear members of the community, 
 
Do you love the armbian OS? 
Are you frustrated by bugs or problems within armbian? 
Do you wish that armbian was even better with more releases? 
 
If the answer is yes keep reading because there may be a solution. 
 
As you know the dedicated team of developers here code this project in their spare time to develop an incredible Linux OS for our ARM devices. They do this for the love of this hobby and we all benefit from it because it is an open source project.
 
One of the hurdles is the fast compiling of the armbian OS. To solve this issue the developers are looking to purchase or rent an 80 core ARM build server. This will improve compilation times and therefore the workflow of the developers. It will mean that they can develop at a much faster pace and more importantly diagnose problems, optimize code and iron out bugs a lot more effectively and efficiently.
 
The developers are currently considering the Ampere Altra. 
 
https://www.anandtech.com/show/15949/ampere-altra-1p-server-pictured-gigabytes-2u-with-80-arm-n1-cores-pcie-40-and-ccix
 
To make this a reality I, on behalf of the development team, am asking for everybody to chip in. If everybody donates just a little bit the developers will be able to get this server and develop the armbian software that we all love so much.
 
What are you waiting for? 
 
Hit subscribe in the menu of the forum. Every major payment method is accepted.

I must add that I mostly use the rpi zero headless without a display.
 
It is too weak to use as a desktop replacement.
 
It is great when used together with a USB battery since the rpi zero has so little power draw.
 
If you're after raw power there are many different better options. 

But this is personal choice. If someone doesn't want to give time for free then it should not do this kind of things. Doing it for free and constantly saying "I'm doing this for free" is ridiculous.

Amlogic has no real-world interest in Armbian or any other mainline tracking Linux distro so they are not going to fork over any $$$ for support. Their business is heavily focussed on Android and some other niche use-cases. Like most/all SoC manufacturers, their responsibilities are to their customers (integrators who buy their silicon chips) and their shareholders, not consumer end-users in the Linux community who want to reflash a $30 device with a $0 distro image that doesn't use any of their software (which is a good thing, the BSP sucks).
 
"Board" devices from any vendor are generally simple to support since the vendor ships u-boot and kernel sources with varying levels of contact and engagement with the community. "Box" devices are a completely different game, with a massively larger amount of guesswork required to get working and a huge issue with device cloning and hidden spec changes. For example; the current X96-Air (S905X3) model which is popular ships in three different configurations and has been witnesssed with 4x different SDIO WiFi/BT chips; which necessitate a different device-tree file to have the right drivers (which mostly don't exist in mainline) probed. These devices are great when they work, but mostly they don't, and they're a massive and frustrating time sink to support, and the percentage of self-entitled users who get whiny about them seems to be an order of magnitude greater than those using boards. So any sane distro maintainer will (and should) focus on supporting boards. Once in a while there will be box exceptions, but they will be infrequent.
 
Any attempt to cause deliberate harm to user installations via software is unethical and I would expect the Armbian forum moderators to take appropriate action to deny promotion or access to such images via this forum if that actually happened. I know that I would take swift action to delete posts/threads and perhaps temp-ban users if this happend in the LibreELEC forums. However I suspect some of the alarm is caused by GoogleTranslate more than Oleg .. it does seem to translate Russian > English with very firm (borderline aggressive) words. Once in a while I've made him post in his native language, which I can read/undertand to a moderate level, and the tone is different.
 
As a side note, I'm stunned to hear that Armbian running costs are 2,000-5,000 EUR per-day .. LibreELEC runs around $2,500 per year

Is anyone else experiencing a problem with the image where they're getting a green and pink vertical line on the left and right edges of the display? On some displays these lines are very visible. On others not so much. 

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/

I am a bit ashamed of citing myself, but this is a small post I wrote some time ago with some explanations:
 
https://forum.armbian.com/topic/14752-device-tree-translation/?do=findComment&comment=106284
 

There is a value called the phandle. 
This value is very much like a unique ID number. As far as I understand it is assigned to each device, however the ID can be anything you want it to be. The phandle is used to link different entries in different locations of the dts/dtb. (like a trace on a pcb). 
 
Now this is where it gets complicated and can get confusing. If your audio or WiFi isn't working it is tempting to take parts of two dtb files and stitch them together. This is not possible because the phandles are arbitrary and can differ from dtb to dtb. 
 
For example your x.dtb might give the audio device the phandle ID of 25, while your y.dtb might give that same phandle to your USB device. If you attempt to stitch them together you might lose both audio and USB.
 
I have a suspicion that a lot of these TV box devices were made by stitching different files together while leaving a lot of bad syntax in the device trees. These dtb files are turning out to be more fun than I thought. 

Hello fellow armbianites,
 
It has been put to me that arm based boards require a DTB file because arm works a bit differently than x86.
The difference between an arm and an x86 board, is that x86 is standardised and always has the same form factor.
When you plug in a device into an expansion slot or port on your motherboard the new device announces itself.
All the addresses are known in advance and hence there is no need for a DTB file.
 
On arm on the other hand board design is not standardised. You can design a PCB whichever way you would like and solder any component onto the board that your heart desires.
There is no single way to design an arm PCB. The devices you solder onto the board do not announce themselves. It is therefore important to know the address location of each device and chip that is connected to the arm CPU.
 
This is where the DTB file comes in. Every chip and device that is wired to the CPU is linked in the DTB file.
 
I am trying to modify a DTB file to suit my box. Why is it that I cannot just take the DTB that came with the box and use it for an OS like armbian?
Moreover I have noticed that more recent mainline kernels have now lost audio on one of the ms1 dtb files. Someone has modified a dtb file with a fix for audio.
Why is a modified file needed? The hardware itself hasn't changed, and only the minor kernel revision. The audio chip didn't suddenly grow legs and migrate -1 hexadecimal locations. How can this be explained?

Hi,
 
 remove the line from install-aml.sh contains /dev/zero then uncomment the line contains boot.ini. After this you can run install-aml.sh to boot from internal mmc.
 
regards, Gabor

I managed to boot into armbian on my box. I used the dtb applicable to my box and the S905X2 u-boot.ext that Balbes' image contains.
 
I wasn't able to use the u-boot.ext that someone posted here for s905x3. 
 
The box boots into armbian with the S905X2 uboot but the image is flickering and tearing. 
 
https://imgur.com/a/96sAz81
 
UPDATE
It turned out that armbian was selecting the wrong HDMI output mode. It was selecting 1080p@30hz which by the looks of it doesn't work with this TV. When I manually set it to 1080p@60hz or anything else it works just fine. 
 
When switched to 1080p or 720p there is some overscan. The outermost edges are cut. Is that normal on a TV screen?