fizban

@pixdrift Actually I also use Balena Etcher and the validation was also successful. The only thing I can think of is that currently I do not have access to my main monitor and I can only use a mini-touchscreen (7 Inch 1024*600), so the first time I tried to boot, since nothing was shown on the monitor I just switched off the orange pi. But sometimes the monitor does not switch on automatically and it has to be switched on with a button, and maybe there was actually something being displayed on it. The second time the monitor showed the initramfs message and stayed there forever. Subsequent reboots showed the same behaviour. Anyway, as I said, after reimaging the card, the first boot went well. Since I do not have currently access to the monitor that had problems with HDMI synchronization, I cannot verify if the new image has also that problem. Regarding additional things in the new image (PR6116_20231230) I did the VLC test to check video hardware acceleration and unfortunately the new image shows much worse performance, with more than 20% frames lost, with videos that previously had 0 lost frames (image Armbian-unofficial_24.2.0-trunk_Orangepizero3_bookworm_edge_6.6.7.bt.fixed.tar). I did not test vlc with the previous image (PR6106_2023122), the one with the video glitch, but it was clear that having to set the scale to something different to 1x really took a toll on the graphics performance. I did not change the scale on the lastest image (PR6116_20231230), remaining at 1x, but still, as I said, the test with vlc indicates problems using the HW acceleration (comparison was done setting output to OpenGL for embedded systems, but other options did not show any improvement)

@pixdrift I tested your latest desktop image (PR6116_20231230) on my OPIZ3 4GB and it seems to freeze at "Begin: Running /scripts/init-premount ... (initramfs)" the serial console stayed at "Starting kernel...". I was not able to go pass that point. The previous image (PR6106_20231229) did not had that problem, although it did have the half screen issue that this image was fixing... Anyway, second time I flashed the same image, it worked fine. I do not know what could have happen the first time... HNY as well!

@Stephen Graf yes, the usb ports on the expansion board work fine. I connected mouse and a keyboard to them without problems.

@pixdrift No, on board sound was not available, at least on the analog output. My monitor does not have hdmi sound, so i cannot test that. Anyway, the Alsa mixer/Volume control does not display any sound device, just the Dummy Output. By the way, now Firefox behaves as expected. I guess the reboot helped also in that sense, although Chromium feels snappier and more stable.

Jus one more piece of news. After rebooting the device (I believe I had to reboot it twice), bluetooth started and I was able to pair it with a loudspeaker, working beautifully. On top of that, I was then able to set VLC to use OpenGL for embedded systems (which did not work before) and, with this configuration, some videos even played with 0 lost frames. I also connected a 4G modem that supported the rndis driver through the USB and it was recognised without problem. I then installed SQM and cake-autorate to keep the latency in control and so far so good. It seems to be working quite stable. This little device seems to be quite promising, with several nice features at an unbeatable price...

First of all, I would like to congratulate and thank you all for the effort put in this initiative. Besides @Gunjan Gupta , special thanks to @pixdrift for making available a test image that we can play with, thus hiding the complexity of compiling the image ourselves. Having said that, and with the intention of giving some testing feedback as you requested, here are some comments. I own a 4GB orange pi Zero 3 with extension board. I started playing with the first image a bit until you uploaded the second image, with which I played a little bit more. With any of both images I did not seem to have good hdmi output initially. By "good" I mean that my monitor detected "something" but I suspect it was not able to synchronize properly. Unplugging the cable and plugging it again seemed to force some recognition and I was able to see the login prompt, but with a lot of flicker and unstability. I remember having similar problems when I played with the miniarch image. With your second image I believe it was worst and I was not able to see anything. So I logged in using the serial connection (see attachment for the boot log over serial). I followed the initial configuration steps and then here the two images seemed to behave differently. While I think the first image started the desktop environment after that, I had to run armbian-config with the second image to activate it. In the first image, once the desktop environment started, I got a good signal through HDMI, albeit in 600x800. I was able to change the resolution but after rebooting I lost the signal again. Getting into armbian-config, deactivating the desktop and activating it again seemed to fix the issue, probably because it activated also the autologin functionality. No browser seemed to be installed, so I installed chromium and I checked the playability of some videos in youtube and they were quite unplayable (not that I expected much, anyway). With the second image, as I said, I had to go to armbian-config to activate the desktop. I selected xfce and it took a while to download and install the packages. After rebooting, nothing was displayed on the monitor. Again I tried the trick of disabling and enabling the desktop to activate the autologin and I was able to have a nice desktop on my monitor, although I had to wait maybe more than one minute until something was shown, and by default I had more than 10 display configuration windows already opened that I had to close (I know, really weird). The usb ports on the expansion board worked nicely and the wifi was also working fine. I was not able to activate bluetooth, though. Maybe I was missing something there. Anyway, I saw that firefox was installed and tried to run it, but it stayed on the task bar without being able to get maximized or anything. So I installed chromium and it behaved much better. It was much snappier than with the previous image. So I checked youtube and to my surprise the videos seemed to be quite playable. I installed then vlc, had to configure it in preferences-video to use xvideo output (xbc) and tested some 1080p sample videos at https://oliverx.link/samples/ . Two samples showed very few lost frames, while using a reasonable amount of CPU, which make me believe they were HW decoded: V206 AVI – MPEG-4 24fps – MP3 and V207 TS – AVC 24fps – AAC So far so good. And I'd say this looks very promising. Thank you again for the effort put in this. armbian serial log.txt