chessplayer

Great, and now I know too

Ah, good to know, thanks!

I just plug the boxes into a switchable outlet ...

@rob0809, what are you trying to say about the NIC speed? At GearBest, it is advertised as Gigabit. Are you saying that this is fake? Sorry, since I am not a native speaker, you lost me with the term "do a bait and switch on the advertised NIC speed" ...

Wow, nice to see that this topic is getting some attention. Also, I would say that it does make sense to look for the Gigabit LAN, which the box you suggest, @Tido, unfortunately does not have. From the boxes I have looked at I get the feeling that this is what makes quite a difference in price (the reason is not clear to me). I do concur about the shop. Aliexpress, Geekbuying or GearBest offer a lot of these boxes at reasonable prices and from my experience (I have ordered from all three) are reliable. And, for what it's worth, I also vote for the RK3328!

Thanks, @balbes150, that works!

Hi guys, Armbian 5.44 with the 3.14.29 kernel is running quite well on my MeCool M8S Pro W box. In fact, there is just one issue, which is a bit annoying: the MAC address is "somewhat" random, meaning taht apparently after leaving it turned off for a while, the MAC address changes slightly (and in any case, it is very different from the one the box normally has (LibreELEC, Android Custom ROM, printed on the label ...)). As I mentioned a little further up, my device tree is taken from a CoreELEC SD card, which should be the same as the one to be found here for the 2GB version. According to this post, the dtb could be the problem, but that is the one I have. Therefore, I tried both of the following in /etc/network/interfaces: pre-up macchanger -m 00:ac:3f:75:c0:ff eth0 iface eth0 hwaddress ether 00:ac:3f:75:c0:ff But to no avail - it remains at 00:ac:2f:78:c0:ff and will probably become something else when I let the box rest for a few days. Any ideas how to overcome this issue? Thanks in advance and Cheers, chessplayer

@balbes150, thanks for pointing that out. Since I am not familiar with these processes, are there any instructions on how to do something like that?

Hi @balbes150, thanks for all your work on these boxes. In order to try things out, I just built the latest kernel (4.18-rc5) using a VM with Ubuntu 16.04 as per your instructions. However, I am particularly interested in getting it to work on a 905W machine. I tried with the pre-built 4.16 kernel version by using the p212 dtb, but that did not work. Using the old 3.14.29 kernel, I was able to use a p281 dtb I found on CoreELEC and that works. What is the best way to transfer that dtb over to the new kernel? Unfortunately, the DEB package containing the dtbs only contains the ones already available for the pre-built kernel as well. Cheers, chessplayer

Thanks for your reply. I will give that some thought. Since I already own a few Amlogic boxes, I will try using those first (with TVH (already working), oscam (expecting no problems) and emby (that is going to be the hard one, I guess)). But all of these AML boxes only have 2 USB 2.0 connectors (why, heaven only knows), while the one I linked above has 3 USB 2.0 and even a USB 3.0 connector (of course, an active USB hub should take care of that "problem"). Also, I was under the impression that Rockchip was much more amenable to OS development than AML, so I am a bit flustered as to why a lot of images exist for AML boxes but not so many for Rockchip. But that is just a user's (not very well informed, I fear) perspective, not a developer's ...

Hi guys, I was wondering whether the image for, e.g., the Rock64 can be expected to work also on a TV-Box with RK3328 chipset, for example this one? Cheers, chessplayer

Thanks for the pointer, but Kodi-wise I am absolutely fine with LibreELEC / CoreELEC. I actually want to use at least one of the boxes as a server, since it seems that the cubietruck is not quite up to the task. I did try OSMC for the Pi quite a while back and liked that also, but, as I said, I always preferred the xELECs for the clients (even with the TVH server in the end, actually).

Ok, I will give that some thought, but that is for another day. Will first try to get going with the 3.14 kernel. Cheers, chessplayer

Thanks for your always quick replies, but unfortunately, that was not the case, I already tried. Meanwhile, I have flashed Armbian 5.44 with the 3.14 kernel and used a device tree available from CoreELEC (gxl_p281_2g.dtb - see the attachment) with that - and it booted! I would rather use the 4.16 kernel, but I will try this now anyway and see what goes. Again, great work you are doing here, thanks! On the other hand, if there is someone who converts dtbs from one kernel version to another, that would be great ... Cheers, chessplayer gxl_p281_2g.dtb

Ok, next question after Armbian is doing just fine on my Nexbox A95, I am now trying to run Armbian 5.44 on my Mecool M8S Pro W and, as the name suggests, this is an S905W box (of type 2+16). As expected, the dtb for the Nexbox did not work, so I tried some others as well. However, based on what was written in this post on the (mostly German) kodinerds forum, what I would need is a dtb with p281 in the name (in the post, the 1 and 8 seem to be transposed). None of those seem to be available, however, in the dtb folders that come with Armbian. Does anyone know where I could find those? Cheers, chessplayer

I apologize. I installed the wrong package (armhf) and that seems to have messed things up. Working now, at least with Sundtek.

Ok, so there seems to be a problem reagrding DVB. Unfortunately, neither the XBOX ONE tuner nor my Pinnacle PCTV Stick seems to be recognized (no /dev/dvb/adapter0 is being created). Using my Sundtek-Stick, this device is being created (in userspace), but TVHeadend does not see the adapter. Does Armbian 5.44 for Amlogic not support DVB? Armbian 5.38 on my cubietruck certaily does. Or am I being stupid?

Hi, thanks for your answer. So I was wrong in assuming that the dtb which worked for CoreELEC would also work for Armbian. But, as I mentioned, I have (among others) an A95X box and since there ia a DTB for this box, mine is now running Armbian with the 4.16.1 kernel (so, I believe it should even recognize the XBOX ONE tuner ...). Great stuff! Thanks for all your work on this!

Hi guys, I am excited to see Armbian (which I run on a cubietruck) has come to the Amlogic devices as well - thanks for that. Now, I already have my boxes running LibreELEC (kszaq) from NAND and I can boot CoreELEC from SD card. So I thought I will flash a card with Armbian and then put the dtb from my CoreELEC card to the boot partition of the new card and see what happens. Unfortunately, not a lot is happening. My Nexbox A95X, e.g., is stuck at its boot screen, while my THL box just gives me a black screen. So, this does not work. What should I do instead to be able to boot Armbian after LibreELEC is already installed on the box? Sorry if this has been asked before, but reading through 58 pages seems a bit cumbersome ... Any help would be appreciated! Cheers, chessplayer

Hi everyone, has anyone tried to make the above mentioned tuner work with Cubietruck? If so, were you successful? Again, if so, what are the necessary steps? It should be possible with kernel 4.11, since the latest LibreELEC distribution includes the drivers in kernel 4.9. Help would be appreciated! Thanks and cheers, chessplayer

Ok, thanks. So now I need a file /etc/modprobe.d/a6210.conf with the following contents: options ap6210 op_mode=2 Also, it is not clear to me whether everybody is aware that in order to make hostapd run at boot, you have to edit the file /etc/default/hostapd and uncomment the line #DAEMON_CONF="" and change it to DAEMON_CONF="/etc/hostapd.conf" I believe it would be good to mention these two issues in your section on "How to set wireless access point" in your documentation. Especially the last point has not really been mentioned anywhere, has it? In any case, I believe it is appropriate to really thank you very much again for the treemdous work you are doing with ARMbian! chessplayer P.S.: Can again be marked as "solved" ...

Hi everyone, after getting Igor's image for Jessie with kernel 3.4.109 on January 10th, I did an upgrade and now I get: uname -a Linux cubieVDR 3.4.110-sun7i #10 SMP PREEMPT Mon Dec 28 11:48:43 CET 2015 armv7l GNU/Linux However, unfortunately I also get modprobe bcmdhd modprobe: FATAL: Module bcmdhd not found. According to http://www.armbian.com/documentation/, it does not say anything about having to do something special to obtain the module in the section called "How to set wireless access point?". Also, on another machine running kernel 3.4.108, everything is working fine (see my post in this forum). What do I need to do to get the AP working? Cheers, chessplayer

Hi again, to answer my own question: a) It is more or less a duplicate of this one (sorry about that). I do not know what excatly I was doing wrong before, but I must have gotten the combination of setting the op_mode for the module bcmdhd and running hostapd with that wrong somehow. Anyway, as Igor pointed out in the thread mentioned in a), we must load the module with the option a mentioned above. This must be done using an appropriate options file, e.g. doing echo "options bcmdhd op_mode=2" | tee /etc/modprobe.d/bcmdhd.conf Doing that, everything is fine (even with the SSID hidden). P.S.: I would like to mark this as "solved", but it seems I cannot change the title ... Cheers, chessplayer P.P.S.: Obviously, someone managed to change the title ...

Hi, I successfully installed owncloud on the Cubietruck. Because of owncloud, I decided to give jessie a try, since there are more packages I need already included. Got all that working. Now, I wanted to make the Cubietruck into a wireless AP following the instructions in the FAQ on Igor's blog. However, i am getting nowhere. After boot, hostapd seems to be running: ps -elf | grep hostapd 1 S root 677 1 0 80 0 - 1040 poll_s 18:25 ? 00:00:00 /usr/sbin/hostapd -B -P /run/hostapd.pid /etc/hostapd.conf However, the SSID is not picked up by any client, so it seems as if it is not braodcast. However, it is not hidden either, since I cannot add the network. When I try to restart the service, I get no output from it (where ist should give some the way I understand the init script). The service is stopped afterwards, but it is not running anymore. I can do: service hostapd status ◠hostapd.service - LSB: Advanced IEEE 802.11 management daemon Loaded: loaded (/etc/init.d/hostapd) Active: active (exited) since Wed 2015-08-05 18:54:43 CEST; 10min ago Process: 1114 ExecStop=/etc/init.d/hostapd stop (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS) Process: 1117 ExecStart=/etc/init.d/hostapd start (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS) Aug 05 18:54:43 cubietruck hostapd[1117]: Starting advanced IEEE 802.11 management: hostapd. Aug 05 18:54:43 cubietruck systemd[1]: Started LSB: Advanced IEEE 802.11 management daemon. Aug 05 19:03:10 cubietruck systemd[1]: Started LSB: Advanced IEEE 802.11 management daemon. Ergo: it stays exited (whereas, when I stop the service and then start it again, it says "running" istead of exited). So, I try the following by hand: hostapd /etc/hostapd.conf Configuration file: /etc/hostapd.conf nl80211: Could not re-add multicast membership for vendor events: -2 (No such file or directory) Using interface wlan0 with hwaddr <somaddress> and ssid "myssid" wlan0: interface state UNINITIALIZED->ENABLED wlan0: AP-ENABLED ^Cwlan0: interface state ENABLED->DISABLED wlan0: AP-DISABLED nl80211: deinit ifname=wlan0 disabled_11b_rates=0 So, it is doing something (until I kill it using <CTRL>+<C>), but what?. The SSID still isn't available, though. Also, according to this, the kernel module must be in op_mode 2: modprobe bcmdhd op_mode=2 This does not change anything, however. Finally, here is my hostapd.conf: ssid=myssid interface=wlan0 hw_mode=g channel=8 driver=nl80211 bridge=br0 logger_syslog=0 logger_syslog_level=0 wmm_enabled=1 ieee80211n=1 wpa=2 preamble=1 wpa_passphrase=mypassphrase wpa_key_mgmt=WPA-PSK wpa_pairwise=TKIP rsn_pairwise=CCMP auth_algs=1 macaddr_acl=0 noscan=1 ## SSID verheimlichen # 0 = sichtbar # 1 = Sende leere SSID und ignoriere Anfragen die die SSID nicht enthalten # 2 = Sende leere SSID, aber setze die Länge nicht auf 0, sondern genau auf die # Länge der SSID (einige Clients brauchen das.) ignore_broadcast_ssid=0 #ht_capab=[HT40-][SHORT-GI-40][SHORT-GI-40][DSSS_CCK-40] #country_code=SI #ieee80211d=1 Any ideas? Cheers, chessplayer

Hi, a different SD card did the trick for me. I also had a problem booting your latest images. I tried both the recommended one (Cubietruck_Debian_3.8_wheezy_3.4.107) as well as the Jessie one (Cubietruck_Debian_3.8_jessie_4.0.4), but there does not seem to be anything happening at all. So I downloaded an older version from the archives (Cubietruck_Debian_3.6_wheezy_3.4.107) and tried with that one - did not work either. Then, with a different SD card, everything was fine. Cherrs, chessplayer