TRS-80

I split off all the discussion of TV Boxes to their own thread, so that you guys can continue to post examples, etc.: In general, I think this thread is growing unwieldy and have requested a new sub-forum (Moderators / Moderation) so that I can split this all up into sub-topics for more organized discussion. Eventually at the end of all these discussions, I hope to distill everything into some shorter guidelines. But I think we need to go through the process first and have all the existing tenured Mods weigh in with all the current sort of "unwritten rules" first, because I am too new and still getting calibrated to the existing culture.

Well done, Werner! Official announcement here (with connection details, etc.):

I have split off all the Moderator Tips, Q&A, etc. to the following (large and growing) thread. To me, this thread is for "signing up" and we can (and are) getting into lots of the nitty-gritty of details, guidelines, clarifications, etc. in this other thread: I also split off posts about Vanitarium's problems accessing post to their own thread. And split the IRC channel related posts off into their own thread. Let's try and now keep this thread for new volunteers and welcoming.

I already went overboard in there once, causing a great kerfuffle. So I will wait and see what others say. After that drama yesterday. I was told the TV Boxes forum are "lightly moderated." So if we are adding to that "light" list: removing Android OS (not Armbian) discussions then that will be news fore me. But I will await consensus. It seems that we are in the process of clarifying some long standing "unwritten" rules/guidelines and getting them written down now, for easier calibration of new current (and future) Mods.

Werner deserves a lot of the credit for this, and setting up the commit bot, etc. Good job man! lanefu gave what I thought was a nice tip (for those of us who aren't bothered by it and like all the info in one place): We are also logging! Logs can be found at https://irc.armbian.com (which currently redirects to https://freenode.irclog.whitequark.org/armbian) as that was easiest to set up initially.

Well, off the top of my head, I think the only way would be to (by default) place all new posts in moderation queue for Development forum, perhaps with exception of known group of Developers. But I think this type of solution would end up to be more work and hassle than the problem. And potentially limit valuable contributions and feedback from new people / Developers joining the community (and might put them off so much they never return). From what I understand that has already been tried with pretty much the exact same results as I just laid out above. But I am the new guy here, so... ? Also, I am having some extra time right now, and able to give the forums a lot of attention, but that will not always be the case. So maybe not the best idea to vastly increase workload of (current and future) volunteer Mods. Just my $0.02. Igor, I know you like to create comfortable environment for Developers who are even more valuable than Mods I would say, but Mods are people, too. EDIT: Therefore taking all the above into account, I propose that the simplest, least intrusive way for Devs and Mods to work together would be to start promoting the idea for Devs (or anyone, really) to simply flag ("Report this content" little flag) and then let us Mods do our job. Hopefully not too distracting for the Devs? EDIT2: If that is not enough teeth for you, maybe give them a day or two (or more?) to think about it (short ban) in addition to the Warning? Personally I am not as bothered by this sort of bumping, but I am not a Dev and clearly it is a pet peeve for you (and perhaps others?). EDIT3: Maybe by creating this sort of super Developer friendly environment, you attract more Developers. IS the trade-off worth it? I don't know. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I hid the post (giving reason: post bumping against Rules, please read again), and sent a PM to the dev (piter75) introducing myself and asking him to let me know if the guy continue to harass him via PM (as I would otherwise have no way of knowing that). EDIT: BTW, guys, I cannot be everywhere all the time, and especially I might not be in dev threads, so if you see this kind of stuff, please bring it to my (and other Mods) attention by flagging, and we will take care of it. Thanks!

lanefu's reply in IRC: Igor pointed something out to me the other day that I had not noticed before. Some times things can slip through moderation queue, and this might even be a forum bug. From the main forum page, look closely for little triangle with exclamation point in it, like this (my theme is dark, but you should get the idea - Igor said it's supposed to be red though?): I found one post today that had been waiting in moderation queue since 2019-12-24(!) Poor guy... Anyway, just trying to keep documenting stuff... Something I found helpful, if you would like to get a greater sense of past things that actually resulted in warnings/bans (and for how long), see: Recent Warnings (Mod CP). There is another option in there, Approval Queue but maybe it's not working fully, as noted above (need to keep a closer eye on this in future)?

Thanks for posting back your working solution!

Hi @Florin and welcome to Armbian forums. Sorry your post waited so long in moderation, it must have been overlooked. I am one of few recent new mods recruited to try and help with the growing forum load. I just now saw and approved it. At any rate, the only supported way of flashing is to use Etcher, since unlike other tools Etcher validates burning results saving you from corrupted SD card contents. Please start over, following explicitly the links in my signature (especially Getting Started) so that we can rule out lots of common problems. And please post back your results.

I was more asking for my own reference (referring to above). Still looking for a definitive answer on that BTW. Another tip: After some dust-up today we can add (from Igor in IRC today) that "Community forums TVBoxes and ... are very lightly moderated" So what are the "..." ? Any more to add to that list?

I think you might be right. But I split your topic off to it's own for discussion. @TonyMac32 made a similar comment (I think in IRC?) the other day, but I wanted to gain more of a consensus before taking any action as I am no where near as familiar as Devs (or probably even some users) on this subject.

Thanks martinayotte. So, is there a hard forum permission preventing someone from posting in the general Development forum? Or just the heading stating not to? I know that when I was a regular user, I was able to post in "Armbian Project Administration" which I know is yet another subforum under that. Probably be helpful to list any such forum permissions, so we don't move something where someone can't reply. Or is general "Development" subforum the only one like that?

Hi garysn, and welcome to the forums. If you can boot ODROID's official image, maybe PSU / SD card are not the problem. But I will wait for someone more knowledgeable to come along.

OK how about this situation (decided to post here instead of IRC for future reference, and benefit of others not on IRC): Guy originally posted in RK3399 subforum. I search internet for the board and find it's actually RK3308 based, quick look around this does not appear to be supported yet (and not even sure how much development going on right now). At first I thought maybe move to Development, but then I noticed "Restricted area for developers and experienced users!" Now I am not sure what settings are in there, but I figured OP with 1 post might not then be able to even reply to his own thread. So instead I moved it to Peer to Peer. Sound about right?

NOTE: I originally found this thread in RK3399 subforum, but according to https://wiki.radxa.com/RockpiS this device is RK3308 based, so I moved it and added that tag to the title. @RudiO, Welcome to the forums! Because this board is currently unsupported, I moved it to P2P section, because I don't think you have access to Development area (and I'm not sure it is really yet under any kind of development anyway). Good luck!

Hi Roman, and welcome to the forums! I split this off the other topic, as it is general software related and not hardware nor Armbian specific. One of Devs (Igor actually) confirmed to me that this is a known (to him) Ubuntu bug. Sorry but I don't have any more information right now. Maybe someone will come along who does. If/when you find a solution (or workaround), please remember to share it back here so others can find it in the future. Thanks!

I do not know the answer to this. Maybe someone will come along who does. My suspicion is "no" however. In general, I think you are on the right track. Look at what else is common with problem device, that is not in common with other 2 that are working, etc... Good luck with your problem, sorry I could not help more as I have no experience with this. Do remember to post solution if/when you find one, to help others in future!

@Alexey, Please do not multi-post the same issue in different sub-forums. I merged both your posts together here, and moved the new combined thread to Common Issues subforum as I suspect it is going to be general software related rather than board or Armbian specific. If that proves not to be the case after further diagnosis, we can always move it back, later. Back to the issue at hand, are you sure the appropriate ports are open/forwarded on your firewall, etc.?

+1 I have been aware of the release activity, but I keep asking myself "what can I do to help" or "what does testing entail?" just to give you perspective from more normal end user, not dev like you guys. And I am only aware of this now since I am more involved on forums and IRC. Many others also would be willing I think, but are unaware, as you correctly state. In other words, yes, absolutely spot on with this assessment. How to solve that? I have no idea, as I don't even know what is involved. But I think maybe Igor is starting to see the growing community as a resource maybe instead of a burden? Which IMO is the better way to look at it. Look how quickly for instance the Mod and IRC situations became solved once help was asked for. What would be involved writing some sort of automated testing tooling to be distributed? I suspect long term the effort might be worth it? But again I have no idea what's really involved.

I don't think you are understanding how UART works, you need to study more. Clue: According to http://wiki.friendlyarm.com/wiki/index.php/NanoPi_M4 (which was the very first link I found, as noted above) the UART pins are already 3V. Everything you need should be there. What are you trying to do (I suspect it's your homework)?

I think you should search the internet for "NanoPi M4 uart", first result I found gives the pinout. If you are not sure how to use UART, you should probably search internet about that, too...

Seems I recall hearing that somewhere before...

Drinking time must have started in Igor's part of the world.

I can certainly relate. But give it some time. As you even said right now you are already stopping some spam. Start with the low hanging fruit, the rest will come in time. I have already found this a valuable resource for mentoring, i.e., "asking stupid questions" until I/we get up to speed...