Domas

Okay I gave up on it and done a fresh install.. Took me 5 hours to get it back up and running, to reconfig x11vnc and samba stuff.

Starting a freshly baked image proved to be a nightmare - for whoever is interested I share my story;
For some reason it did not detect wireless dongle for keyboard. So I could see it over hdmi but no input was possible. Did not have a wired keyboard at hand. at first run it did not became accessible over ssh. but an ip address was assigned to it by dhcp router; I could see a new ip when I'd start it up. but it would not respond to ssh requests. But serial connection saved the day. Luckily I did have a serial adapter. Created username/password and then it was accessible over ssh and I could ditch the crappy tv screen I was using
 
Selected wrong locale on setup, was unable to get rid of it without commenting wrong locale lines in ~/.bashrc
 
Then I spent some few hours to get vnc up and running with lightdm and crapload of other dependencies, packages. Thanks AI for assistance. When asking quality questions and sharing messages/outputs it was super useful (I dont keep anything confidential there)
Manually created /home/domas/startxfve_headless.sh script, made it executable, the whole orderal

Not to mention xfce was not installed by default on this debian/minimal image. It was fun one too.
https://docs.armbian.com/User-Guide_Armbian-Software/Desktops/ - armbian-config --cmd XFCE01 just ran the script and nothing happened without any error
Had to do it manually but I think it worked the first or second time.

And the most fun one since it included multimeter and soldering iron: then it did not detect my disk over sata no matter what I do.
Apparently measured 0v at hdd power connector. Not sure how I killed it.
After some fiddling around I connected jst connector's for hard drive 5V power to one of gpio pins that supply 5v. HDD spins up - YAAAY.
It was short-lived. Disk Still undetected. Probably usb to sata controller is not powered on since 5v regulator fried. (thanks AI for ideas)
So then I jumped a wire from said gpio 5v pin to the back of what used to be 5V connector for hard drive so it both feeds the disk and backfeeds the boards 5v regulator with the needed usb to sata controller. I don't use gpio.

ITS ALIVE. No, I did not believe it would work. But at this point I had nothing to lose.

Sketchy? Yes. Have I ever pulled worse? Sure. Proud of myself? You bet.

 

Yes, both via vnc and ssh (putty)

So it was a success.
 
Version information updated too now

 
 
But it did want to both uninstall and update armbian-bsp-cli-orangepiplus after updating armbian.list file and running apt update/upgrade
 

 
Do you think it is safe to autoremove them if the system is up and running?
 
I am so happy I managed to fix my junk from 2015.... It is probably a $30 board from china. But there is just something about making old hardware work for as long as possible.
 
Thank you all!

Wow, unbelievable. But happy to see it is so actively maintained.
I don't mind being on beta for time being and I am fine with updating this often. I actually enjoy receiving updates, since I decided to switch to beta and keep the kernel unfrozen.
Worst case scenario - if some beta breaks my back, I will just restore whole SD card to a few month old backup and update to latest stable.
I do not have anything useful on my board that changes over time.
 
Lets consider this topic closed.