TRS-80

I can only imagine how happy @rpardini will be not needing to re-base any more. Jokes aside, kudos to you, you must be thrilled all your hard work will be seeing the light of day, finally. Thanks for sticking with it all that time.

Thanks for the feedback. Just to confirm, you have one of the more recent batch?

This is a (somewhat) long standing and well known issue, check PineBook Pro subforum here, there are a number of threads about various booting issues (including eMMC specifically). I think the problem (with the latest batch of PBP which were shipped, anyway) is that those came with Manjaro on the eMMC and no universal bootloader (tow boot) flashed on the SPI chip. Well thinking about that now, I guess burning to eMMC should still work, but it doesn't for some reason. Have you tried using armbian-config (and/or (the unfortunately named) nand-sata-install which can also be reached from there) to try and write the image to the eMMC? If you already overwrote the eMMC previously I guess there is nothing left to lose. I have this hardware but I just acquired an old headphone cable which I still need to fashion into a serial cable before I can proceed further. And I have yet to collect enough 'tuits' of the round variety.

This thread sounds oddly familiar (but I'm not going to bother searching). Anyway, I encourage you to consider configuration management as a separate concept to 'imaging the entire OS as a backup' as there are a couple problems with the latter approach: It wastes a lot of space. Upgrading in-place between major OS versions is not (and has never been) supported in Armbian, so sooner or later you will probably have to re-install everything anyway. In the configuration management space there are things like Ansible (and many, many others) in fact just searching up that term should give you plenty of ideas.

I think you should read his reply(ies) again (and some others in this thread), perhaps more carefully this time, as I came away with a different interpretation.

Yes, we (ab?)use the 'spoiler' functionality for that. I edited your post already.

I am surely no expert, but starting to wonder if something Manjaro put in their bootloader is not compatible with Armbian. This is not directly related to what NicoD was saying above, but I did want to report my experience. I have tried burning both the following images to SD card, in both cases I just get a blinking green power light: Armbian_22.08.1_Pinebook-pro_bullseye_current_5.15.63.img Armbian_22.11.1_Pinebook-pro_jammy_edge_6.0.10_xfce_desktop.img As a reminder, I have one of the newer (2022-06) production run of PineBook Pro, which comes with Manjaro pre-installed on the eMMC from PINE64. I have been unable to get Armbian working on it in any way, shape, or form ever since I bought it. So I don't use it at all (as I can't stand Manjaro nor KDE, personally). Anyway, I took a look at the eMMC (had to boot into Manjaro to do so) and it seems there are 2 partitions, one for /boot and one for /. Oh yes and BTW there is a switch by the eMMC which is supposed to bypass it (otherwise on RK3399 the boot order is SPI, eMMC, SD card), when I do that I get a steady orange light. But still no boot.[0] Even though I never use the pre-installed Manjaro image, I am still too afraid to flash anything directly to the eMMC (especially after reading many reports it doesn't work). I am going to order the special 'headphone to serial' cable that is required for the PineBook Pro, in hopes that I might be able to contribute further useful information. [0] OK, truth be told, I only tried this with the 22.08.1 image, as I didn't want to take out all those damn screws again just to get to that switch. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

There might be, but it will be difficult second or third hand (from us, to you, to him...). Easiest and fastest way will be just to install fresh from scratch. Back up any important user data first, though. I guess you might need to learn some very basic GNU/Linux terminal commands, even for that. But plenty of guides around the Internet for that (you will need cd, ls, cp, etc.). Good skills to have anyway. Another way to get your files off, if the OS drive is on sd card, or eMMC (and you have some adapter) you could mount it on working Linux desktop and go through and look for / move files in a GUI file manager. And/or, just buy more media (sd card / eMMC), write new OS image to that, and hang on to the old one until you acquire some way (tools/skills) to access it. At least that gets you back up and running in the meantime.

Yeah, this way also occurred to me today. Great minds think alike, I guess. Thanks for hints.

If it can be installed on Debian, it should be able to be installed on Armbian the same way (as userland packages are same). So maybe search Internet for regular Debian instructions? Sounds like maybe you have already though. I am unfamiliar with tensorflow, but a quick search of Debian packages for tensorflow seems to indicate whatever is available is in the experimental repo, and then only for amd64 (x86 64-bit) architecture. You would need something for some kind of Arm architecture for whatever your board is. So, unless I am badly mistaken, I think you will probably have to compile from source. Maybe search Internet for something like 'tensorflow on Arm' or similar.

Would a regular encrypted drive/volume solve your problem? I guess you could also keep the OS on an SD card, and remove it when not using it? Possibly and/or using some hardware encryption key as well? Most security really boils down to defining your threat surface (what you are trying to protect from). I am kind of tired, but I am having a hard time framing things from this perspective in my mind right now for your situation. Probably just me. And a lot of that is not really Armbian specific, anyway. You can use what you like, but you may find that Armbian is far ahead of a lot of other distros, at least on SBCs (and obviously/especially where you prefer Debian based distro). A lot of NicoD's videos are about Armbian desktop, not other distros.

That doesn't have anything to do with Armbian. Search Internet for information about Widevine. Although, personally, I would just avoid any service employing Digital Restrictions Management (DRM).

I seem to recall hearing once that the OrangePi boards were pretty popular. It seems to me that usually, less expensive boards are popular. Someone who actually knows something would have to provide you with some actual numbers. And I am not sure where this sits currently (what I mentioned above was some months ago).

You've got that right! Werner mentioned, but I will reiterate: You could learn a lot by studying/using our build framework. hanging out in IRC, etc.

More thoughts on this topic: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/19978-so-you-want-to-run-a-file-server/

Good research, @calinb. Did you take into account what Werner said up thread about PBP boot order (apologies, but I only skimmed your posts)? More people (including myself) should be receiving PBP soon, as they have done another production run. So, let's keep trying to figure this out. I'm sure others will be joining us. Am I understanding correctly that this did work at one time (my guess would be via nand-sata-install only, due to things Werner said)? If so, what changed? Another clue is that Manjaro apparently have it working currently. How are they doing it?

I mean, yeah, big problem here. Arm-RISC-V-Bian just doesn't have the same ring to it.

I had some problems trying to build today and last night as well, could not retrieve release file(s) from mirrors. Your errors look very similar to mine, not sure if related or not.

I would check out some of NicoD's videos on YouTube, as he is a desktop Armbian user and has made several videos from that perspective. I am sure there must be some other forum threads around here about it as well. If you meant swapping SD cards, then OK. But if you mean a true live distro, like on a USB thumb drive (as on x86), then probably not (in most cases) as arm/SBC world is very different from x86, especially around booting. If you can't get that to work in a (bloated) browser, a workaround I often use is to open the video in mpv. In fact you can do something like 'mpv youtubelink' and mpv has youtube-dl (or equivalent) installed as a dependency and can usually download and display the video all in one go. Saved me more than once on several low-spec or older devices. I somehow missed this on first read. But I guess it is one of your main requirements. I don't think you will find that. Because Linux kernel, and drivers, etc. (what you might call firmware) are being developed all the time. And so they will be moving forward, and released with new versions of Armbian. Having said that, at least with Armbian (and Free Software in general) you can see what the sources are, where they come from, when they get upgraded, build your own if you like, etc. There are also some options to freeze kernels, etc. which would get you pretty close to what you are looking for I think. As close as I think you will be able to get, anyway. Very few of these vendors provide any real long term (mainline) software support. Such is life in SBC world. These devices are fascinating, but it is up to us to keep them working (N.B. some of links/statements in my forum signature).

I think you might be able to install them from armbian-config (not sure)? If not, there is a build option to INSTALL_HEADERS. Edit: I did not realize that we are in WIP section, until someone in IRC pointed that out to me. Above comment still applies, generally.

AFAIK, those are just user space programs? Which would mean, that they should install just as any other program. Especially if you are doing so into some container or (Python?) environment. The only exception would be the GPIO, now this is something which might have more to do with Armbian (generally speaking). Is that a package name, or? Maybe search forums about how to get GPIO working on OPi Lite. The GPIO might even work 'out of the box' on Armbian (not sure; but if so, trying to install other things might be messing that up). Getting GPIO to work (permissions) through container might be another problem area. Maybe just use directly in user space (if possible) or sort out permissions. Sorry, I don't own this hardware so can't give specifics. But I try to help in general, anyway.

Yep, by now they are available in the store! Too bad I had to move and been spending money like a drunken sailor buying things for the new place. I might not have enough left now for a PBP.

Sorry for again disappearing. It took up much more time and energy than I thought to find a new place (very tough market here) and get moved. On the up side, I have my own separate bedroom/office now, where I can hack away on my mechanical keyboard late into the night (previously my battle station was in the bedroom and The Missus is a light sleeper, lol)! Still unpacking and getting settled in, still need to build a shed, etc. but at least my battle station (and SBCs) are back up and running again now!

Sorry could not make the meeting. I just read the notes. I am back to work now but locally (almost no travel) so I can have a little time here and there maybe to help with the release somehow. I'll try to hang out in IRC.