Taz

Hello armbian accomplices, I though I would share my little journey about getting this tablet rooted with magisk so that hopefully one day armbian could run on it. Steps: 1. on android become developer 2. enable oem bootloader unlocking in developer options 3. adb reboot bootloader 4. fastboot oem unlock 5. reboot, the os will be wiped 6. install Magisk apk from github releases 7. get Teclast T60 AI firmware from their site it contains Firmware.img 8. ./sunxi-fw extract -n "wty:init_boot.fex" -o stock_init_boot.img Firmware.img 9. transfer to device and patch with Magisk app 6. adb reboot bootloader 7. fastboot flash init_boot_a /path/to/magisk_patched_init_boot.img 8. fastboot flash init_boot_b /path/to/magisk_patched_init_boot.img 9. fastboot reboot Now do people know about what needs to be done to get xfce with armbian booted on this apparatus?? I think I need better AI agent for this than Deepseek as it is a bit sloppy as usual, Gemini Pro or Claude probably.

Okay I think you are right they are shifting the RAM GB numbers so 8 GB is actually 4 GB as the price suggests. Now now, what I ended up doing is I bought a Teclast T60 AI tablet(for 100 euro shipped in EU) with Allwinner A772 which is supported by armbian and comes with 6GB RAM. I do not know if I will be trying to boot armbian on it soon but I was able to root it with Magisk. It did went on quite a journey to get it rooted as I kind of soft bricked it at first. Deepseek was giving me little wrong information but we got there. I think I might need a more competent AI agent like Gemini pro to get display, touch, wifi, bluetooth etc. working with armbian. Perhaps I post about the rooting process elsewhere at some point. Here is some of the gear I have if people are interested: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005009330391341.html DUX DUCIS Foldable Bluetooth 5.0 Keyboard with Touchpad & Phone Holder For Phones Tablets PC iOS Android Windows Mac https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005011827691576.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005009419399930.html HGFRTEE 3840*2160 13.3inch 4K Portable Monitor All in all pretty pleased with it so far, not exactly Surface pro 5/7 which I also have and they all weight about 1000 grams but then on the other hand this tablet did not cost me hundreds of $ so I can be little less nervous about someone stealing it.

Howdy hey. What do you guys think of this Android TV Box Q19 Android16 Allwinner H618 https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005011785087357.html it does claim 8GB ram and price is ~40 euro ? or 95 TV Box Android14 Allwinner H616 https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005009496923463.html which one is a better bet?

It is not worth the effort to fiddle with a 256MB micro sd card, just get a at least 32 GB micro sd card and get on with it. I have 256 GB tf card and I am glad I chose this big and not smaller. Even if you managed to get 256MB /boot partition to boot and system from 32GB usb driver combo to work, you are asking for a massive headache if you ever run out. Generally speaking, the minimum I would go for is 64GB tf card with SDXC label(or UHS-1 I think) on it like Kingston Canvas Select Plus. Unless you live in something like North Korea, you should be able to get one for less than 10 euro.

That would be swell if everyone would follow the rules, but in reality some apps try to evade Pi-hole by providing their own DNS addresses.

I use Q96 Max to run Pi-hole, Home Assistant in supervised mode, WireGuard, NFS, qBittorrent and Apache. I have openwrt box setup so that it redirects all outgoing DNS to my Pi-hole instance, and since I have wireguard on my phone, I get zero advertisement even on google apps.

Well, the issue with r8152 and probably some other devices like 1000Mbps ethernet adapters and maybe SSDs is that these things have only limited amount of RAM for buffering. If the CPU just isn't fast enough to clear those buffers you are going to get buffer overruns.

X88 Pro 10 at least one I had is such a source of misery I swapped the SD card to H96 Max and now everything is much better. I will be flashing the android image back to it as soon as I get a fly mouse and use it to play angry birds or something on my projector instead. My advice, do not buy X88 Pro 10 instead stick with H96 Max only. At least on H96 Max reboot works so you can set up watchdog to reboot it unlike on X88 Pro 10 which has unreliable reboot. On my H96 Max there is no built-in wifi is not detected so I stuck a wifi adapter on it. I do not have much appetite to try to fix it. As soon as I plugged in r8152 to H96 Max it went completely bazooka with: [Thu Sep 28 01:17:41 2023] xhci-hcd xhci-hcd.0.auto: WARN: HC couldn't access mem fast enough for slot 1 ep 6 [Thu Sep 28 01:17:41 2023] r8152 3-1:1.0 enx00e04c6824a3: intr status -63 is causing something to occur in Home Assistant virtualization within seconds of any traffic taking down all wifi, eth within 10 seconds. So I spoke too soon, r8152 is not usable on these boxes at least not when plugged into usb 3 maybe there is a way to make it work as usb 2.0 but I was unsuccessful. For comparison r8152 chipset works fine with my Orange pi PC which has usb 2.0 and seems super fast as well. I found one seller on aliexp who sells RTL8156 2500Mbps Ethernet adapter: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003432672849.html I think they both use same driver but hey I figure it is worth a shot.

Okay, it seems 6.5.x series kernels are not crashing but instead freezing with: [Thu Sep 28 09:59:54 2023] NOHZ tick-stop error: local softirq work is pending, handler #08!!! in dmest -T. To deal with this problem I went to armbian-config -> System -> Bootenv and added: extraargs='nohz=off' . I have a feeling this is an inherit problem with these slower arm based boards so I do not think this is not going to get fixed anytime soon. I also found: [Thu Sep 28 01:17:41 2023] xhci-hcd xhci-hcd.0.auto: WARN: HC couldn't access mem fast enough for slot 1 ep 6 [Thu Sep 28 01:17:41 2023] r8152 3-1:1.0 enx00e04c6824a3: intr status -63 But as far as I can tell this is not fatal anymore and one should be able to use RTL8153 Gigabit Ethernet Adapters without any major issues.

6.5.3-edge-rockchip64 kernel is crashing here as well. Have not found my uast usb adapter that works with this board yet and it is super annoying when my home assistant and therefore lights depend on this so will probably downgrade kernel to get out of this situation.

I did full "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade" and landed with 6.1.53-current-rockchip64 kernel. I have had two hard crashes of the system in two days with this kernel, edited /etc/default/armbian-ramlog to disable ram /var/log to see if I can track it. Also noticed that the 50MB /var/log is not big enough and it was full. I have also tested 256 GB SDXC1 (Kingston canvas select plus) on the armbian rk3318 and if there was any doubt of being able to access the whole card, it is working fine. EDIT: found nothing useful in logs. EDIT2: testing 6.5.3-edge-rockchip64 kernel now