Parth

@fabiobassa my plan here is simple, i wanna use it as a linux box where i can have a 21inch touch screen display running a flutter app. and ofcourse some other nittygritty things like it would be controlling some hardware over usb, would have GSM for network connection and so on. since this is a cheap thing available than a raspberry pi, best to use this for the purpose.

hi, thanks a billion, to my surprise things are now working. so both the images provided by @jock works, but the bookworm seems to be commandline only with no desktop environment? but the armbian-trunk works too with the xfce. i happen to have noticed that armbian-trunk/noble is a bit slow for my liking. and i wanted to go more lightweight which can also run basic desktop environment. so i wanted to poke around with the kernel but my knowledge to play with it is limited. also i wanted to turn off all the splash screen and boot messages coming on the hdmi and i could not do that. so it would be great help if you can point to the following. 1. How can i rebuild the kernel and the image to flash onto the board 2. Is there Debian-bookworm available? with desktop env? 3. what are the steps or any guide available online where i can compile the kernel and images provided by armbian community? thanks a ton in advance, and thanks a lot for helping me throught till here.

@jock so i will first put the emmc in reset mode with shorting the pins, erase the emmc and then just simply connect the sd card with the image which you asked to download (its downloading) and simply test it, in terms of i shall get something on the UART right? thanks a lot for the prompt response.

will keep that for later, i am too poor to understand the kernel then linking it to the os, i am actually trying to study all that, but could not find the right resources. so let me read first and get back on the forum after i am done trying. thanks a lot tho for giving hopes to me, means a lot, thank you. i will try that as well. right away. @jock just to be sure, i should first flash the bootloader V1.10 given on first page of this forum then load the image which you provided in the sd card and try right? thanks everyone to take out time off your schedule and respond to my posts. it really means alot. thank you all.

after i made the comment above, i did try almost all the possible bootloader files i could get online but apart from the bootloader given on the first page of this thread, none of the other bootloaders are working. apart from that, even on the uart terminal its all just garbage and nothing else. and yes, i do understand, being an embedded engineer, i have faced that quite a lot.

thanks a ton for the prompt responses @jock @MattWestB @RaptorSDS let me summarize, 1. i dont really do care about how much ram and rom i have got, the goal is to get the linux working on this processor. 2. i am still lost in terms of, checking with the uboot and hitting all the keys on the uart, i cannot see the usual fat-arrow line which you should get in uboot to type the commands. all it gets stuck at is whats shown in the images. 3. the multiboot/uboot is still not going further of anything at all, i still have to try for network, but i doubt it would be useful since the uart itself is not showing the data which i or even you guys expect. 4. there are no blinking lights or any lights working on the device since ive started installing linux, the last time i saw any lights working was when i unboxed the device and tested if it even works. 5. all i can do now is, short the emmc pin, and get the device in the MASK ROM mode, while in that mode, i did the following things Tried to download the bootloader and note that only this version ```V1.10.238``` gives me a success saying downloading bootloader succeeeded ./rkdeveloptool db /home/parthasus/Electronics/TVBoxRelated/rk322x_loader_v1.10.238_256.bin then i can even pass the upgrading loader command to it. ./rkdeveloptool ul /home/parthasus/Electronics/TVBoxRelated/rk322x_loader_v1.10.238_256.bin even that works, and all that works for now after shorting the emmc pin and while the device is in MASK ROM mode. i even tried to flash another bootloader file ```RK32xxLoader(L)_uboot_V2.15_replace_ddr.bin``` but that did not work. so now i am back to square one figuring out what should i do next and what should i flash next? yet again thanks in advance.

Hi all, so i might keep things long or maybe short, since ive spent over 12 hrs trying to walk through forums and leading to nothing so far, i am lost and confused at the same time. so sorry in advance. i happen to have got myself 2 mxq pro 4k boxes one with 2GB ram and 16GB rom and other with 4GB ram and 64 GB rom. the 2GB ram apparently to my surprise had rockchip3128 which happened to be useless for my purpose so now its gonna be in the parts bin. but got lucky with the 4GB version and got a RK3228A. i had already spent 4 hrs prior at night doing all the research before i began buying things and making it work. unfortunately things did not go according to the plan. i followed the guide which is the post 1 of the thread, and was not aware about things like how to check if ive got emmc or nand. since i am an embedded developer it was not hard to pinpoint the part number and grab some chinese datasheet, which atleast mentioned as emmc. moving forward i followed the below mentioned procedure. while working with the above steps the first hurdle i met with was the image i choose was the following ```Armbian_community_24.11.0-trunk.253_Rk322x-box_noble_current_6.6.54_xfce_desktop``` and for some reason while at multitool step where it was asked to copy the image into the folder, the size was larger of the compressed image so i just resized that multitool partition. and added the image onto it. finally as easy as the steps were mentioned, i installed the sd card in the hopes it would boot from the SD card, and it successfully did not. Jumping between different tutorials and youtube video like the below mentioned ones. Installing Armbian on Rockchip RK3288 Android TV Box (M8S RK3288) Backup and Restore Your Rockchip Android Box (e.g. MXQ Pro 4K) Using AndroidTool & RKDumper i was still not able to get things working. again coming back to the same quoted post, i followed the no-sd method and still no luck. finally i was able to install the uboot and then installed the image took note of the flash info and all. but finally i managed to brick the device. to conclude i still am not able to get it run armbian, and nope, im sorry my excitement and overconfidence took over me and i did not backup the flash. so having the hardware knowledge handy, i can still get it into the mask rom mode, and flash the bootloader but still nothing works. sharing some screenshots and my uart dump. the below one i got while i plugged in or even did not plug in the sd card with the armbian image. this one below, i got after i erased the flash hoping it will pick up the sdcard as my boot option but still, if i insert the sdcard i would get the uart data, if i remove it and power on. nothing. since this whole post is 4 years old there are some links broken on internet, and i got no clue where to start with to fix it. any minute guidance would also help a lot. moreover here is a folder screenshot of all the files ive got with me for making this work. (Please note that my daily driver laptop is linux popOS, and the windows files are ran on windows 10 on virtualbox)