BoringName

Well that was fun. Termux wouldn't load so I found an older version from 2022 thinking that version is older than the box so has a higher chance of working. That also wouldn't open until I went a bit silly and attempted to open it multiple times. Just like Mustafa in Austin Powers, once I attempted to load it 3 times in a row it would show up. Bizarre but I now have a dump of Device.DTB How do I view it properly? I opened it in notepad++ and most of it is gibberish but I can make out a few details that are a bit surprising. Namely - allwinner,h616 arm,sun50iw9p1 The label on this thing says H618 but it appears to be a H616. Where do I go to from here? Edit: I have attached the dtb file and two dumps of the file. One using fdtdump and the other using dtc. It seems the btlpm section has the same values of a device Nick referenced on page 4 of this thread. I don't know if that means anything.... Edit2: I tried "Armbian-unofficial_25.05.0-trunk_Transpeed-8k618-t_bookworm_edge_6.12.11_xfce_desktop.img" this boots ok, ethernet works but again, no wifi/bluetooth. I'm a little surprised every image I've tried so far has mostly worked. I guess these vendors just throw together whatever parts they can get cheap but the core of the units is the same. Thanks. dtsdump.txt fdtdump.txt device.dtb

I didn't mention earlier but after I ran the update/upgrade commands I also manually updated the locale file. During the original setup I accidentally selected the wrong locale, I went into armbian config, deselected the wrong one and selected the correct one but the incorrect locale was still being referenced constantly. So I manually removed it from etc/default/locale. I thought this may have been a reason for it no longer booting and not the update/upgrade commands. I'm just explaining that so you understand why I also tried update/upgrade with the x98h image. Turns out it wasn't me messing with the locale that stopped it booting as this image also will not boot now after apt-get update, apt-get upgrade. This image originally booted ok and it seems the ethernet works better. Downloading from the commands listed above took about 20 seconds vs 30 minutes on the vontar image. But wifi/bluetooth still will not work. One other difference is when I select the bluetooth manager app it actually loaded whereas the vontar image would state something about a service not running. The app loaded but had no devices listed. I'll see how I go with termux. The play store doesn't work on it but I was able to sideload a couple of apps.

I tried apt-get update and apt-get upgrade thinking it might grab what it needs but that was a bad idea as it will not boot at all now. So I may as well start from scratch and try the x98h image. The wifi chip is the same but item 3 on mine is samsung and item 7 is an FD650 which is referenced on that page as a possible alternative. It might be worth noting the units digital clock display was blank using the vontar image, I expect that was due to the chip mismatch. I'll see how the x98h image goes, if that fails I'll look into termux. No wifi isn't the end of the world as I can find a use for it just using ethernet but wifi (and bluetooth) would be nice. Thanks.

This is a great thread. I've had a magcubic android 12 box I've been using for a while just to watch things off a USB when we stay at hotels. It looks like the one in this video but the chip ID's are different. Mine seems to be running with Samsung memory, the clock chip? is FD650 instead of FD6551 and the wifi chip is labelled as HK5236F. Most hotel TV's don't support modern video codecs so this has worked ok. But I want to look at accessing my NAS remotely and this box is a bit of a dud if you want to install your own apps. Play store doesn't work, aurora store doesn't work. Tried sideloading Tailscale and it just crashes. While doing some research I noticed it also seems to be sold under the Vontar brand so I flashed @Nick A "Armbian-unofficial_25.05.0-trunk_Vontar-h618_bookworm_edge_6.12.11_xfce_desktop.img" to an SD card and it booted up. Happy days. It appears to have ethernet but I have not plugged it in yet. No wifi though. I just have 2 questions. 1. Is there any way this can be made to boot from internal storage or do I need to keep the SD card in if I want to run Armbian on it? 2. Is there a driver available for this wifi chip and do I need to mess around updating the boot image or can I just run a command for it? I'm not a regular linux user but I've got a bit of experience messing around. I don't currently have an environment setup to build my own image but I've played around with WSL before so I could probably set something up. Thanks for everyone that has contributed to this. It's good to make use of these boxes considering how cheap they are.