Joseph Kesselman

...Got it working with Debian (not armbian) if I controlled the power-on and connection order carefully. But the easier fix was to grab a used i3 desktop machine and install Ubuntu Studio into that, reserving the SBC for future projects. It's amazing what SBCs can do... but if you don't need maximum compactness, minimum power draw, or direct hardware interfacing, sometimes using something better standardized/supported will be the winning choice. Oh well. Only a small detour, and a few bucks that it turned out I didn't need to spend right now; not a disaster. "No honest effort is ever wasted; it can always serve as a bad example."

Ok. Sigh. Nature of open-source and edge cases...

The solution I've used on other systems, to continue picking up most of the configuration from DHCP but state which address I want, has been to add an "inform" clause to the dhcpcd configuration. I'm told this is currently preferred over using the "static" clause. I'm not clear on how it differs from "request", but it's doing what I need. I still need to figure out how to get local dynamic DNS service running, but hosts files are doing the job for now.

I see there's mention elsewhere of forcing resolution with extraargs=video=HDMI-A-1:720x480@60 I presume that means I should try this with famous combinations from the VIC lines?