ericxjo

A minor nit-pick (how do I report it?) If I open sound, and get to the "Sound" window and go under the "Output" tab in Cinnamon Armbian 23.5.1, it will show the HDMI out as "Analog Output / Built-in Audio" and show a generic icon of a sound card. There's no way to know this is HDMI Audio out, except to try it. I also have another option, which was set by default until I changed it - "Headphones / Built-in Audio". I don't have headphones with a cord right now, so I don't know if that actually works. I also note that the Orange Pi 800's built-in speaker is not an option on this list, and I don't know how to select it. To make this work as I would expect it to: The default should be HDMI Audio out, given that that is the only audible option that's currently plugged in right now. It should be labeled as HDMI Audio out. It should have an appropriate, specific icon (maybe an HDMI logo?) There should be a Headphones, but as a second, non-default option. There should be, a third icon, maybe "Internal Speaker / Built-in Audio" and it should have an icon of a speaker. I also did some testing of the internal microphone. It is not listed on the "Input" tab of the "Sound" window. There are two generic entries listed, identical, both "Analog Input / Built-in Audio", and having a generic sound card icon. Saying "test test test" and tapping on the Orange Pi 800's case near its microphone hole while either of these two icons were selected did not make the "Input level" indicator change in any way, it seems to be set at zero. I take this to mean that the 800's microphone is not supported by this OS right now. I expected to see one microphone icon (since the system only has one built-in microphone), for it to be set as default, and for it to work (the level indicator should bounce when I make noise). How would I go about volunteering to work on this?

Okay, about the mouse issue. It works fine -- but I will give Rasbian this: They have a great first setup wizard, and that wizard can deal with the "my only mouse is a Bluetooth mouse" issue quite neatly. It will detect if there's no mouse and let you set a Bluetooth one up from the get-go. This is a great feature, and I think Armbian should also implement a similar solution.

Running the new Armbian release (23.5.1), and everything seems to work. At least the problems I was having seem to have gone away. I JUST installed it and tested it, so consider this about half an hour of testing. But WiFi works fine as far as I can tell (no idea yet if it stays up reliably over time), and audio through HDMI works fine (listening to it now!). Bluetooth might work and seems to get much farther. In the last release, Bluetooth would just crash if you clicked it, but now it pops up a window, and my mouse shows up. I only have one mouse, so if I switch it to Bluetooth mode, I can't click the button to confirm it! I'll look around for another Bluetooth item, but it looks like it might work. At least it's not crashing. And the stuff that worked before is still working, so it seems. So this is quite a release for the Orange Pi 800. To be clear, I am using the Cinnamon version of the "Orange Pi 4 and LTS" image. Okay, still exploring as I write this post... Going to sleep and waking up again left me with a garbled monitor image. Unplugging the monitor and plugging it back in instantly fixed it. This would happen in the last release as well, and I just disabled sleep. This only happened with the native Orange Pi monitor, other monitors did not show this behavior, so perhaps it's a problem with the monitor. I will test this further. Okay, tested Bluetooth further, but not the sleep/monitor issue (I'm back), and Bluetooth works fine. Side note: In the last version of Armbian, one of my USB ports didn't work. It was the rightmost one looking down on the unit. It still doesn't work, so perhaps that's a hardware problem.

Hi, i tried this image (Armbian_22.11.0-trunk_Orangepi-800_jammy_current_5.19.17_xfce_desktop.img.xz) and it's lightyears ahead of what the default OS that the Orange Pi 800 comes with and has for offer for download from the Orange Pi 800. I noticed that if the kernel upgrades or initramfs, it will still boot, but opengl stops working and there's other problems. I'd like to hold all that but allow all else to upgrade normally. Is it enough to hold linux-image-current-rockchip64 or do I also somehow have to lock initramfs or what else? I realize that using a self-described alpha release is a bad idea, but what if the official builds are even worse? Maybe make /boot read-only on the first boot? Any ideas would be welcome. Otherwise many things work well -- I tested WiFi, sound over HDMI (simply just select it in PulseAudio Volume Control and shut the other one off -- I did not have the problem with it not showing up that others seem to have had), and Bluetooth works fine. Thanks, this distro, even at alpha stage, is better than what is offered by OrangePi themselves. Side note, slightly off-topic but I think closely enough related, I tried installing cfs-zen-tweaks (https://github.com/igo95862/cfs-zen-tweaks) and set /sys/block/mmcblk0/queue/scheduler to bfs and that really made this a smooth desktop experience (I am using f2fs as well). Honestly it works fine for desktop use. Thanks again!