Taz

1. https://github.com/apritzel/sunxi-fw 2. "adb reboot bootloader" takes you to fastboot if android boots up, "fastboot" if you are at u-boot terminal. See help for list of u-boot commands, I do not know that much about it but you can feed the list to AI and see if something useful comes up. So to get gpu acceleration going, we need to get this 6.18.19 kernel booted https://github.com/NickAlilovic/build/releases/tag/Radxa-Cubie-A7A-A7Z-A7S-Mainline-V0.1 Have any ideas on why I cannot get any mainline kernels to boot @Nick A i tried "setenv bootargs console=ttyS0,115200 earlycon=uart,mmio32,0x02500000,115200 keep_bootcon ignore_loglevel debug clk_ignore_unused"

You can find the pinout at https://linux-sunxi.org/MicroSD_Breakout : CD is rx, CLK is tx and GND. There is a risk that using 3.3 v TTL levels on the tf card slot could fry the microsd controller so I would suggest getting the 1.8V version I mentioned earlier. So here is how I boot debian Trixie these days: (still need to figure out how to automate this but I do not know how yet using u-boot) setenv bootargs console=ttyAS0,115200 root=/dev/sda28 rw rootwait init=/sbin/init clk_ignore_unused sunxi_flash read 4007F000 boot_a sunxi_flash read 4fa00000 dtbo_a fdt addr 0x4fa00000 bootm 4007F000 - 4fa00000 Or to automagically boot: setenv bootargs 'console=ttyAS0,115200 root=/dev/sda28 rw rootwait init=/sbin/init clk_ignore_unused' setenv distro_bootcmd 'sunxi_flash read 4007F000 boot_a; sunxi_flash read 4fa00000 dtbo_a; fdt addr 0x4fa00000; bootm 4007F000 - 4fa00000' saveenv Write dtb: dtc -I dtb -O dts -o tablet.dts tablet_patched.dtb dd if=tablet_patched.dtb of=/dev/sda24 status=progress conv=fsync dd if=tablet_patched.dtb of=/dev/sda25 status=progress conv=fsync You need these on host: sudo apt update sudo apt install debootstrap qemu-user-static How to prepaire the rootfs which will be flashed to userdata using fastboot: fallocate -l 8G teclast_trixie.img mkfs.ext4 -b 4096 teclast_trixie.img sudo mount -o loop teclast_trixie.img /mnt/trixie sudo mount --bind /dev /mnt/trixie/dev sudo mount --bind /sys /mnt/trixie/sys sudo mount --bind /proc /mnt/trixie/proc sudo debootstrap --arch=arm64 trixie /mnt/trixie http://deb.debian.org/debian sudo chroot /mnt/teclast /bin/bash passwd root echo "t60" > /etc/hostname apt update apt install build-essential kmod # you will need to install bunch of others but not more than 3 GB I think because fastboot wont reliably transfer more exit sudo fastboot erase userdata sudo fastboot flash userdata teclast_trixie.img How to do the raxda kernel: ./magiskboot unpack boot.img cp ../../raxda_kernel.img kernel ./magiskboot repack boot.img new_boot.img sudo fastboot flash boot_a new_boot.img sudo fastboot flash boot_b new_boot.img Wifi driver is a bit complicated(TBD): modprobe aic8800_bsp modprobe aic8800_fdrv ip link show wlan0 Here are the stock partitions: root@t60:~# blkid /dev/sda26: SEC_TYPE="msdos" UUID="2200-140B" BLOCK_SIZE="4096" TYPE="vfat" PARTLABEL="media_data" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e5e" /dev/sda22: UUID="dd7fd886-b74f-41cf-a5b1-bf1b47afaf8c" BLOCK_SIZE="4096" TYPE="ext4" PARTLABEL="treadahead" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e5a" /dev/sda1: SEC_TYPE="msdos" LABEL="Volumn" BLOCK_SIZE="512" TYPE="vfat" PARTLABEL="bootloader_a" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e45" /dev/sda23: SEC_TYPE="msdos" UUID="4019-0FB8" BLOCK_SIZE="4096" TYPE="vfat" PARTLABEL="private" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e5b" /dev/sda21: UUID="a5aa7e72-84f0-40c4-9693-2a2ad5896309" BLOCK_SIZE="4096" TYPE="ext4" PARTLABEL="metadata" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e59" /dev/sda28: UUID="f84bc812-d087-4cba-a90f-d045d40d2e44" BLOCK_SIZE="4096" TYPE="ext4" PARTLABEL="userdata" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e60" /dev/sda4: PARTLABEL="env_b" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e48" /dev/sda16: PARTLABEL="vbmeta_system_b" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e54" /dev/sda2: PARTLABEL="bootloader_b" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e46" /dev/sda24: PARTLABEL="dtbo_a" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e5c" /dev/sda14: PARTLABEL="vbmeta_b" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e52" /dev/sda12: PARTLABEL="misc" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e50" /dev/sda9: PARTLABEL="init_boot_a" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e4d" /dev/sda20: PARTLABEL="empty" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e58" /dev/sda10: PARTLABEL="init_boot_b" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e4e" /dev/sda7: PARTLABEL="vendor_boot_a" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e4b" /dev/sda19: PARTLABEL="frp" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e57" /dev/sda5: PARTLABEL="boot_a" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e49" /dev/sda27: PARTLABEL="pstore" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e5f" /dev/sda17: PARTLABEL="vbmeta_vendor_a" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e55" /dev/sda3: PARTLABEL="env_a" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e47" /dev/sda25: PARTLABEL="dtbo_b" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e5d" /dev/sda15: PARTLABEL="vbmeta_system_a" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e53" /dev/sda13: PARTLABEL="vbmeta_a" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e51" /dev/sda11: PARTLABEL="super" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e4f" /dev/sda8: PARTLABEL="vendor_boot_b" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e4c" /dev/sda6: PARTLABEL="boot_b" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e4a" /dev/sda18: PARTLABEL="vbmeta_vendor_b" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e56" tablet.dts

Howdy. if you have the tf uart adapter thingy, by the time it shows that on screen you are at the u-boot prompt where you can do what you want. e.g. start fastboot. I believe this tablet cannot be bricked because you can always enter FEL mode and use phoenixsuit. It can be maddeningly difficult to phoenixsuit to flash cold tablet but i recall it was like this: press and hold vol+ and power, plug usb cable with phoenixsuite ready to flash. release power button and vol+ few seconds later.

Had to debootstrap trixie because depmod version mismatch. Wifi 2.4 + 5 GHz + BT headphones, keyboards all work. USB is still stuck in plain charge, no micro SD. According to Gemini 3.1 Pro which I have been using, Imagination Technologies (PowerVR) BXM-4-64 MC1 would need 6.12.x kernel or newer which I have not been able to boot yet. This actually feels a bit faster than the Teclast Android even though without accel youtubes playback is quite slow. Battery life probably 5+ hours. aliexpress.com/item/1005009649297050.html keyboard + touchpad I have is a bit shady miss-clicks a bit once in a while. Might have to AI haxor some software filter to get it behave a bit better but that should not be that big of a deal. I have kind of already made up my mind, this ain't going to boot Android anymore, have to see if I grab another one at some point.

Okay slight update, I have successfully booted https://forum.armbian.com/topic/56130-radxa-cubie-a7aa7z-allwinner-a733 linux 6.6.98-vendor-sun60iw2 kernel and debootstrapped Bookworm (Debian 12) on it using userdata as root fs. Basically I got in using: aliexpress.com/item/1005009243708714.html Micro SD Sniffer aliexpress.com/item/1005010529282186.html in 1.8v mode(important!) And fiddling with the u-boot endlessly after i first sabotaged the auto-boot process. Display is alive, usb subsystem does not work, does not probe. Wifi would be next so I can ditch the tf uart. All your bases belong to us, resistance is futile!

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 system will be wiped clean 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 10. adb reboot bootloader 11. fastboot flash init_boot_a /path/to/magisk_patched_init_boot.img 12. fastboot flash init_boot_b /path/to/magisk_patched_init_boot.img 13. 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 2.5+ or some Claude probably. I ended up battling with this for a few days.

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.