TRS-80

This will be the Moderator counterpart to the Announcement thread I made about the same issue where I asked for help from regular forum Members. In this thread, I will discuss methodology I developed to deal with these sort of spammers, once someone has Flagged such post(s).
 
Humor
 
But first, some humor. Does anyone remember this guy? Anyway, that old infomercial kept playing over and over in my head today while I was working on this. I think we stumbled across some of his students! OK, carrying on...
 
What Not To Do
 
First thing to probably point out, let's not simply edit out these links one by one as we come across them. That doesn't really solve the problem. In fact it makes it worse by eliminating the "trail of bread crumbs" so to speak, the easiest way we have to "get them all" (which is by recursive searching). Allow me to explain...
 
These links seem to be posted in groups, by a small number of spammers. Once you catch on to one part of a cluster of them, it is actually pretty easy to methodically work your way through and find quite a few more, and "get them all" (within a given cluster).
 
Modus Operandi
 
But let me back up even more, for those who are totally unaware of this issue. What these people (we think they are human) are doing, is to register, and then post some at least seemingly relevant information in some topic, at least enough to get their post(s) approved. Then they come back some days or even weeks (!) later, and edit their post(s) to insert spam links. To see some actual examples, have a look at the Announcement post linked in the beginning.
 
1. Check Profile
 
So, once I found one such post / Member, the first thing I would do is look at their profile. Typically they will have from 1-5 posts or so. I would right click, and open each new post in another tab. Sometimes you will have to search then in the thread (using your browser search function, Ctrl-F in Firefox) to find the post. You will quickly be able to determine whether they are a spammer or not (you will see all the spam links in all their few handful of posts).
 
2. Flag as Spammer
 
Once you are certain they are a spammer, there are a couple ways you can "Flag as Spammer." Since you already have their profile open, you can click that button in there. Other way is to mouse over their avatar, and then the gear at bottom right opens another little menu that gives you the same option. This should be the first real action you take, because it does a couple things all at once (which will save you some time):
it Hides (not Deletes) all their posts, and Bans them from the site (permanently)  
Note that the above are subject to Admin settings, and these are the current settings as of this writing.
 
3. Being Thorough
 
Now, if you like to be thorough (I do) I will also kind of go through the threads that contain their spam posts (especially after their post(s)) and look for the following:
did any other user (usually unintentionally, or on accident) quote the spam links? if so, edit out those spam links by hand and leave a note what you did make sure no actually useful content was hidden (I have yet to find this in even one case)  
4. What Must Be Done (at Minimum)
 
However at a very minimum, you should be taking down a list of all these spam links you come across. This is key to the whole process. Methodically complete all of the above for each spammer and each of his posts. When you are done you should have a list of spam links, and one or more Banned spammers, with all their posts Hidden.
 
5. Working our URL List of Spam Links
 
Next step, we do a regular search on the forums for each of the spam links in turn. I like to leave this search window up, and again right click and open each result in a new tab, do whatever I need to do, and then come back to the main search result list, and keep going. Some pointers for this phase:
Some results will be ones you already discovered Other results will lead you to additional spam posts and/or users. Take care of each of them in turn (as above) and continue to add to your URL list. Scratch each spam URL off your list once you have worked your way through all the results for that particular spam URL. Some times you may have to "massage" the URL a bit if it is too close to common search terms shorten to base URL add quotes around it prepend "https://www." etc...  
6. The End
 
Get yourself a cold, tasty, delicious adult beverage of your choosing. You earned it. You have made the world a slightly better place than it was this morning. You have Maintained Civilization. Etc. 
 
I think that just about covers it. Any questions, comments are welcomed.
 
One thing I would like to re-iterate, if you don't have the time / patience for this, just Flag the post(s) and leave it for someone else who does. I think it's better to handle these properly and thoroughly than to half-arse it, deleting few links and then handicapping our ability to "get them all" later on.
 
Thanks!
 
EDIT: As an example, I will include my working list, below. This is what I came up with in a couple of hours this afternoon, all starting from one link that @Igor sent me in IRC (this is a bulleted checklist and table from org-mode; names of non spammers vindicated in my search have been removed):
 
 

This will be the Moderator counterpart to the Announcement thread I made about the same issue where I asked for help from regular forum Members. In this thread, I will discuss methodology I developed to deal with these sort of spammers, once someone has Flagged such post(s).
 
Humor
 
But first, some humor. Does anyone remember this guy? Anyway, that old infomercial kept playing over and over in my head today while I was working on this. I think we stumbled across some of his students! OK, carrying on...
 
What Not To Do
 
First thing to probably point out, let's not simply edit out these links one by one as we come across them. That doesn't really solve the problem. In fact it makes it worse by eliminating the "trail of bread crumbs" so to speak, the easiest way we have to "get them all" (which is by recursive searching). Allow me to explain...
 
These links seem to be posted in groups, by a small number of spammers. Once you catch on to one part of a cluster of them, it is actually pretty easy to methodically work your way through and find quite a few more, and "get them all" (within a given cluster).
 
Modus Operandi
 
But let me back up even more, for those who are totally unaware of this issue. What these people (we think they are human) are doing, is to register, and then post some at least seemingly relevant information in some topic, at least enough to get their post(s) approved. Then they come back some days or even weeks (!) later, and edit their post(s) to insert spam links. To see some actual examples, have a look at the Announcement post linked in the beginning.
 
1. Check Profile
 
So, once I found one such post / Member, the first thing I would do is look at their profile. Typically they will have from 1-5 posts or so. I would right click, and open each new post in another tab. Sometimes you will have to search then in the thread (using your browser search function, Ctrl-F in Firefox) to find the post. You will quickly be able to determine whether they are a spammer or not (you will see all the spam links in all their few handful of posts).
 
2. Flag as Spammer
 
Once you are certain they are a spammer, there are a couple ways you can "Flag as Spammer." Since you already have their profile open, you can click that button in there. Other way is to mouse over their avatar, and then the gear at bottom right opens another little menu that gives you the same option. This should be the first real action you take, because it does a couple things all at once (which will save you some time):
it Hides (not Deletes) all their posts, and Bans them from the site (permanently)  
Note that the above are subject to Admin settings, and these are the current settings as of this writing.
 
3. Being Thorough
 
Now, if you like to be thorough (I do) I will also kind of go through the threads that contain their spam posts (especially after their post(s)) and look for the following:
did any other user (usually unintentionally, or on accident) quote the spam links? if so, edit out those spam links by hand and leave a note what you did make sure no actually useful content was hidden (I have yet to find this in even one case)  
4. What Must Be Done (at Minimum)
 
However at a very minimum, you should be taking down a list of all these spam links you come across. This is key to the whole process. Methodically complete all of the above for each spammer and each of his posts. When you are done you should have a list of spam links, and one or more Banned spammers, with all their posts Hidden.
 
5. Working our URL List of Spam Links
 
Next step, we do a regular search on the forums for each of the spam links in turn. I like to leave this search window up, and again right click and open each result in a new tab, do whatever I need to do, and then come back to the main search result list, and keep going. Some pointers for this phase:
Some results will be ones you already discovered Other results will lead you to additional spam posts and/or users. Take care of each of them in turn (as above) and continue to add to your URL list. Scratch each spam URL off your list once you have worked your way through all the results for that particular spam URL. Some times you may have to "massage" the URL a bit if it is too close to common search terms shorten to base URL add quotes around it prepend "https://www." etc...  
6. The End
 
Get yourself a cold, tasty, delicious adult beverage of your choosing. You earned it. You have made the world a slightly better place than it was this morning. You have Maintained Civilization. Etc. 
 
I think that just about covers it. Any questions, comments are welcomed.
 
One thing I would like to re-iterate, if you don't have the time / patience for this, just Flag the post(s) and leave it for someone else who does. I think it's better to handle these properly and thoroughly than to half-arse it, deleting few links and then handicapping our ability to "get them all" later on.
 
Thanks!
 
EDIT: As an example, I will include my working list, below. This is what I came up with in a couple of hours this afternoon, all starting from one link that @Igor sent me in IRC (this is a bulleted checklist and table from org-mode; names of non spammers vindicated in my search have been removed):
 
 

I have added SPI workaround to the radxa eMMC install wiki page:
https://wiki.radxa.com/Rockpi4/install/eMMC
 
Btw: I am wondering why Armbian isn't using GUID partition table. Was GUID partition table not working on older Radxa ?

As I am a new Moderator and I am unfamiliar with this particular board software (apparently called "Invision Community"), I went looking for some docs...
 
Came across https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invision_Community.
 
The first thing I noticed is that it is proprietary software. Which I think is very out of character for a F/LOSS project at least alluding to the name Debian. Which carries a number of connotations, at least in my mind... Which is a whole another discussion, however...
 
Secondly, a quick read through that Wikipedia article quickly reveals a number of documented cases of changing things on their users, going back on their word, etc. I see red flags all over the place. Not the sort of software I feel inclined to invest a lot of time into learning. But I am the new guy here, so...
 
Has there ever been any discussion of perhaps changing forum software? Or why this one was even picked in the first place (familiarity, Jira or other integration, or...)? I did a few different searches (internally and externally) but couldn't come up with anything.

The 768MB arc_max was for a vmalloc of 1024MB and I was using zfs 0.7.12 when I wrote that, but since then I have switched to 0.8 (with Thumb2 patches from github). I have looked at this again (now with 0.8), and it seems the situation has indeed changed. When looking at vmalloc of zfs (spl actually) via /proc/vmallocinfo it seems to hover around 100-150MB with about 220MB being the highest I've seen and also the total address space occupied by all allocations has always been under 300MB and usually far below. So it seems rather compact with only little fragmentation happening. So zfs appears to use less vmalloc than I assumed and more lowmem, so I will have to revise my settings, because they clearly don't make sense anymore.

@NanoP
 
I don't own a M4, but I do have a T4 and whilst testing on that my drive came up as it should. My own personal experience with Rockchip and USB3 ports hasn't really been a good one and because of that, I do not use them as a NAS. Which is and I'm just guessing here, what ur trying to do.
 
If it is power related, may i suggest getting a small USB powered hub?

I gotta be honest with you, I do like the finicking! Plus I'm tight on money. So I'll play around with uboot and its commands any day. I just found out that USB Mass Storage emulation works fine for playing around with the emmc from a PC!
 
I never mentioned Armbian in my post. Armbian is very important and I'm thankful it exists. As far as I'm aware armbian is the only ready out-of-the-box experience for this board (the ones from Firefly are old and they crash a lot)
I'm using an Armbian U-Boot with Archlinux on this board for months now.
 
I was talking about Rockchip specifically. Armbian is a community distro

A few of us have been experimenting with this the last week or so, seems to work well. But I wanted to bring this to the attention of all the rest of longer term Mods like @chwe @balbes150 @NicoD @TonyMac32 @JMCC (please tag any others I may have forgot) as well as site level Admin like @lanefu and of course @Igor.
 
As a new Mod I often feel like a Level 1 Tech Support. Or perhaps better stated, "triage." Which I figure is our purpose, to "take care of" as many low hanging fruit as possible (or at least sort to correct place, maybe adjust title, tag, ask OP for further info, etc.), in order to free up time/attention of Devs and more experienced users. I try to take on as much as I can, but there are simply things I am unsure about (and from private discussions, I know other new Mods feel same). As our knowledge grows over time, we will be able to take on more and more. But I think we can slightly better use the tools this software already provides to help with this (IMO, some times necessary) mentoring process. I realize you guys are busy (hence need for Mods in first place) however...
 
Give a man a fish, and he will eat for a day,
Teach a man to fish, and ...
 
So I request to the more experienced Mods and Admins, please take few moments here and there to help teach us newer guys (when we need help) how to fish...
 
But this post will also be for my fellow new Mods, as well ( @soerenderfor @Vanitarium @_r9 @jsfrederick , I went through Mod sign up thread already, but please tag any others I may have missed) so please, read on...
 
Newer Mod (or even regular user) can click on little Flag at bottom of any post:

 
And then enter some question what they need guidance about:
 

 
Now this will show up to all other Moderators and site level Admin as little triangle in upper right corner:
 

 
So far pretty simple, I am sure most of you are aware of this functionality already. Now this is what I propose to codify into some kind SOP:
 
If we still require attention / advice of someone "higher up" then we leave Status as "New Report" (Flag logo):
 

 
Once someone "higher up" replies, then they/we can change Status to "Under Review" (Triangle ! logo):
 

 
Where we leave it until person originally raising the flag either:
gets their answer, at which point they can Close the Report, requires further clarification, in which case they can change back to Flag to raise more attention  
I think this is a good way of fast, easy triage and sorting, because:
it does not pollute IRC or forum threads (and less airing of potentially "dirty laundry") relevant discussion is attached directly to the thread in question "higher experience level" (Mods, site level Admin) can immediately see filtered view of what might need their attention (Flag logo), without having to read all of forums, or even pay attention to Moderation discussions, where they are not needed. However at same time should they want, can also get quick overview of moderation advice being given by Mods to each other, and could add their 2 cents if disagree. "medium experience level" Mods can help mentor lower level, to extent they are able, already relieving some load off "higher level" people, while still asking some questions themselves "lower experience level" Mods (and even regular users for that matter, although unable to see discussion on the Mod side) can get their questions answered, receive mentoring from "medium and higher" level people, and thereby eventually progress upward Over time, this will also build a body of knowledge which new Mods can look through when they have time to get up to speed (similar to reviewing past Bans, etc.)  
Do note that this entire proposal is only for the meta of Moderation questions themselves, i.e.:
should this be moved to x sub-forum I am not sure this qualifies as violating rule # x etc.  
If you think this is a good idea, please say so here, and/or just start fulfilling one of the roles "low, medium, high" as outlined above, befitting your experience level.
 
I encourage any and all Mods to communicate with each other in this way, adding your $0.02 to whatever Mod discussion, where you feel it adds some value.
 
Feedback on this idea also welcomed, of course.

Check out the attached screenshots of commits.  I believe you may need all three of these patches.  One is modifying the simple panel driver to include our specific panel, one changes timing ,   one is to force recognition of the panel, I believe.    I sent the screenshots becuase I couldn't figure out how to get the patches off of gitlab,  but I imagine you will know how to do that.   There have been many patches over the past 3 months,  but I think these are the ones that enabled the display.    There are more for bluetooth, wifi, sound, usb-c , etc.
 
WE now have a mainline u-boot that will, when flashed to SPI , boot an NVME.   If you get a build that displays ,  I'd like to try to get it to boot with the new u-boot.   My poblem right now is that everytime I start making build system changes --I tend to get a headache   .  I did much better with the older ( from a few months ago) build system.  The problem is me, of course, not the build system.  
 
At least serial is working well now.Schramm_panel_commits.zip

Really looking forward to running armbian one day on my S905x3 device but ran into difficulty from the get go running aml_autoscript.
I was initially posting here with a cry for help but managed to sort the problem and thought I'd share my solution as this alternative method doesn't appear to be documented anywhere.
 
The problem:
 
Downloaded and burned Armbian_20.02.0-rc1.037_Aml-s9xxx_buster_current_5.5.0-rc6_20200205.img to sdcard.
Using the update app that was preinstalled on the android device, I tried loading aml_autoscript from external sd card, usb ports and internal storage but got the same error every time.
E:Block map file is too short: 3 E:Map of '@/cache/recovery/block.map' failed E:failed to map file Installation aborted I tried all the above with different sdcards and usb sticks but still no luck. Running aml_autoscript from stock recovery gave a different error:
E:mmap(0, R, PRIVATE, 6, 0) failed: Invalid argument E:Map of 'udisk/aml_autoscript.zip' failed E:failed to map file Installation aborted The solution:
 
I didn't want to go down the uart/uboot route as I don't know where the tx/rx points are on this box and my eyesight isn't that great anymore. Plus my soldering days were over many years ago. I was able to boot into a twrp.zip via stock recovery, but there was no setenv command in the twrp console to enter the info manually. Perhaps there is a command I could enter to run the aml_autoscript from here, I have no idea. I decided the way forward was to extract the env partition with twrp (you can just as easily do it with dd or fastboot) and hack it before flashing it back. I opened the file up with a hex editor and could see what looked like a uboot environment with fatload commands etc, a 4 byte header at the start of the file then each command separated by a null byte. I'm looking at yet another brick if I bork it, so I'm not doing this with a hex editor. Convert it to a text file, make the changes and convert the text file back to the original 8mb image format was the plan. All I had to do was trim the trailing zeros and replace the remaining null bytes with a newline. I copied the file to my PC to do the job but it can all be done from a rooted box with busybox installed.
cp env.emmc.win env.emmc.bak; cat env.emmc.win | sed '$ s/\x00*$//' | sed "s/\x00/\n/g" > env.txt That one-liner seemed to do the the trick (note backup). The resulting file gave me:
 
 
So, I delete the 1st 4 characters as it turns out this is a checksum and if it isn't right then everything goes back to default values and it's back to square one. Then amended the exsisting variables (bootcmd and upgrade_step) and added the start_* variables. Note each variable has an '=' before the definition and there are no quotes, so not exactly copy and paste from the aml_autoscript file. I also observed that the environment variables were sort of in alphabetical order and thought it cautious to keep it that way and inserted the new variables between the 'serverip' and 'storeargs' variables. Now it was just a case of saving env.txt and converting the file back. As the 4 byte checksum needs to be there, I had to install uboot-tools as only the mkenvimage command can do this and build the env image.
mkenvimage -s 8388608 -p 0x00 -o env.emmc.win env.txt Check the file with;
cat env.emmc.win | od -tx1 Burn the file back to the /dev/block/env or $(find /dev/block/platform | grep by-name/env) partition. Remember the file is now modded so the original twrp backup checksum won't work. Recreate it with;
md5sum env.emmc.win > env.emmc.win.md5  

If you want to jump on the bandwaggon of dumb hardware decisions (sharing USB and ethernet, etc.) and firmware level RTOS / bootloader / GPU blobs that really run the show (instead of your installed OS) then go right ahead.
 
Look I get the frustration. But there are lots of (much!) better boards than RPi to function as a NAS. If you really do want to join the masses and go buy an RPi then you can stop reading now. Otherwise, your options are:
Do more research before purchasing, and make sure you get something that is stable and all the bugs are worked out. OR Buy whatever unknown hardware and then perhaps consider contributing in one way or another, in order to bring it up to full speed / support. Personally, I am only low to mid level (at best) wizard, so I chose to do the former. I started with Cubietruck a few years ago, and it has run absolutely flawless as a NAS and running numerous services.
 
The situation with these SBC is a crap shoot. There are lots of holes you can step in (as you found out). But there are also hidden gems. Thus is the nature of the thing.
 
I for one am very happy that we have Armbian, otherwise we would have no (good) options whatsoever on all of this other hardware that are not RPi. So much in fact that I started supporting (financially (only a little)) and even helping out around here (Moderation most recently). But I am lucky to have the resources (time, money) to be able to do so (in other words I am not judging anyone who cannot, in today's difficult economy).
 
Just my $0.02. Anyway, rant over. I'm sorry but something about your comment I found dismissive to the efforts of all these people and Devs who have already put so much time, effort (and their own money) since years, just so regular people like us can Have Nice Things.

This occurs usually when /etc/ssh/ssh_host* key files are corrupted from some reasons (bad SDCard, etc) ...
To recover them, you need the Serial Debug, then you can delete those corrupted files and recreate them using "dpkg-reconfigure openssh-server".
... Or, take a new SDCard, write again the image, and retry the process ...

You can free up a core using isolcpus kernel parameter and then move your task on the unused core using taskset:
simply set it by adding extraargs=isolcpus=1 to your /boot/armbianEnv.txt
https://codywu2010.wordpress.com/2015/09/27/isolcpus-numactl-and-taskset/

So good news.... I got a 1G Rock64 V2.  build RC1 image
 
totally works
 

Odroid does not behave like PI.

Odroid has one blue diode which signals heartbeat signal. After connecting the power it will light up. If it finds a boot and starts booting, it will start flashing. The blinking speed depends on the load.
The red LED is on all the time when the current reaches the sbc.
The green LED lights up when HDD is connected, blinks when HDD has activity.

The first start of Armbian needs about 30 seconds before it is ready for the first login.

it was highly overpriced with 400-600$ (IMO still 100$ are too much for it) it is mostly undocumented what you got is a 4GB ddr3 rk3399 'TV box' with 2x2 wifi over mPCIe and 32GB eMMC with a 'connector' I've not seen any specification what's populated on it
. which may or may not work with a 'generic DT' (generic means here any rk3399 dt file we have most of them are quite similar cause they follow more or less the reference design) for rk3399 boards. You can also (try to) 'extract' the dtb file from 'whatever is preloaded' on this box.. decompile it and follow all the phadles to see how nodes are connected to each other.. to adjust a working DT to match the box better or write one from plain.. (you can also use this blob directly on any sort 'armbian' and see if it is compatible).
 
at least it has a debug UART populated (likely 3v3 but who knows, you should check that first)
 
Is it worth it.. well that's up to you.. if you're interested in going down the rabbit hole and learn new things.. maybe it is (you can spend a lot of time with bootloaders, device tree etc. on it.. IIRC ddr3 should be supported with mainline u-boot, and what they have labeled 'service only' looks like a SD-card holder, so you can likely do your 'try and error attempts' to get something 'armbian a like' booting on this board without corrupting the OS which is currently preflashed on the eMMC.
likely similar to that stuff here:http://wiki.t-firefly.com/en/Firefly-RK3399/adb_use.html
 
So to summarize you currently got a paperweight and it's up to you to transform it in something useful. Even then I don't see much of a reason to provide support on such a board. It has a 'unknown' availability (you got it cheap from ebay, but as soon as this sellers run out of stock, it's likely never appearing again). For 100$ you get the nanopi m4v2 with a case which offers known schematics, support from the boardvendor, known connectors (including eMMC, PCIe, hdmi, camera and display interfaces) and the vendor known in SBC marked for years (they may not do everything perfect but you mostly know what you get, and in general those boards work as they should). This box might be nice if you plan to learn and dig into what can make it a pain to support random boxes with 'somehow' proper working images. But you may have to build your images on your own for a long time in case non of the images we provide for rk3399 will work out of the box (I would focus on images built for ddr3 ram type boards).

Thank for your advices. My PR has already been merged. https://github.com/armbian/build/commit/48bb7ca9aec095138805c06ebde6d9d0b71ad9a3

I solved my issue! I isolated it to the set_fixed_mac call in the armbian-firstrun service, specifically after the "nmcli connection down <uuid>" call.
 
I use ip=dhcp in my kernel command line and at this point the root filesystem is mounted over the active ethernet connection. I don't really understand the purpose of set_fixed_mac, but bringing the connection down is not going to work with nfsroot. I've commented out that set_fixed_mac call and now everything seems to work. Happy days!

Wanted to be sure of that. It was not that long ago that we were chasing issues with OrangePi 4 not booting from Armbian with SD that had Xunlong's BSP image on that card before (because of secondary GPT) ;-)
 
Now it looks more clear and a bit unfortunate... ;-)
U-Boot 2017.09-02676-g4490220395 (Jul 01 2019 - 07:49:56 +0000) The u-boot image is pretty ancient:
g4490220395 => https://github.com/radxa/u-boot/commit/44902203959cef9d92dff2f36896c7ec27fb3d88
in next commit Radxa added DOS partition support to it => https://github.com/radxa/u-boot/commit/59412e4610af669538a057995ed2d418703723a2
I have a later g674eaa57f0 in SPI and it boots Armbian fine  => https://github.com/radxa/u-boot/commit/674eaa57f03d48aa1803650a901f0244563eea60
Full history here: https://github.com/radxa/u-boot/commits/rk3399-pie-gms-express-baseline
 
Now the positive stuff...
@raidboy to boot Armbian images without creating GPT on them you can simply connect pin 23 with 25 (or any other GND/black) pin on GPIO header. This disables onboard SPI.
To erase the SPI you could use this guide: https://wiki.radxa.com/Rockpi4/dev/spi-install#Erase_images_on_SPI_device.
Writing zeroes with dd to /dev/mtdblock0 while being booted with Radxa's image should also do the trick ;-)

Hi everyone. I have compiled sunxi-next u-boot and activated the SoC internal analog audio codec, now I am testing the mali node. Audio Working!
Commit:
https://github.com/juanesf/u-boot/commits/master
 

For the interested, here you find my pull request for a device tree for the H96 Max+ (RK3328) which works with the mainline kernel:
 
https://github.com/LibreELEC/LibreELEC.tv/pull/4195
 
(I guess) compared to other DTBs it adds support for things like the remote control and the blue LED. I am planning on doing the same for the T9 (RK3328) box (as soon as I receive it).
 
Feel free to review the PR if you think you have some input, thanks.
 
Here the DTB (for testing with mainline Linux images):
rk3328-box-h96mp.dtb

Answer to myself (and others) - you need the right dtb. Did that, and it boots.
Found in the single Armbian image thread. Only issue now is funny colors, and that it reboots (nice shutdown) on entering root password.
Tried using ssh and I am asked to change password. Strange behaviour.
No way to install to eMMC - tools not included - tried eoan. Now trying Bionic.
Both aoen and bionic fails to reboot from SD. Goes in a reboot loop. Powercycle and it boots ok.
Next problem,  no install menu option, and no nano-installs script. You have to look in the homedir of root :-)

It arrived!
This is going to be a non-professional tear-down and quite a WIP!
 
The intent of posting this up was not just to show off a cheaply found / obscurely deployed rk3399 board, but to possibly open development using Armbian.
If possible, boards like this and other hidden gems that might pop out of the woodwork as we may find them may come with amazing things only found at usually outrageous prices  for the business market.
 
As I found this, it was intended to be a $400-600 DIGITAL SIGNAGE MODULE sold to education private and public I suppose. For one reason or another the modules themselves are being sold near mint, at anywhere from $40-100. A fair price for something that is just parts at worst. Still, the hope and GOAL here is to attempt as much hillbilly hackery as possible to see what else can be done, and armbian seems to be the most hopeful solution for an OS.
 
Any suggestions are welcome, technical, critical, or otherwise that might improve interest as such;  BUBBA proudly present and DESTROY
smart technologies am40 rk3399 module - now with more pie and banna!
 
 
Technical Stuff
 
guideam40installv31aug17.pdf - The manual that comes with the module product new in box. It also requires a smart tv with touch capability to insert it into. I would rather install a 3rd party touch screen such as raspberry pi 7-10 inch touch screens like any normal rk3399 sbc..
 
For now however, I've attached the "module" to something more familiar, pictured here:
 


 
 
comparisoniqappliances.pdf
 
Comparison of the different modules you may find for various prices with a similar chip-set. The am50 do look cool, but Bubba can't find one priced to destroy.
 
Photos:
sorry for the terrible camera filter I had on. posted anyhow to show general size of board. surprised it 1 pound!
 
Front - with added 1 antenna (can have 2)

 
Rear - Serial Port (including power) aka: Open Plug-gable Specification

 
Side - Service Switch (used for booting operating system of SD I believe, hope for armbian)

 
 
Inside:
"disclosure fitting for rockchip"
 
Bubba am not certified to do anything except destroy. To give you an idea, Bubba had to carry a rock to tech school during basic electronic week for dumb as rock answer. A week how long it took to realize there's rocks everywhere and Bub didn't have to carry a rock for  a week in the first place!
 
Anyone who already didn't know, (me had to research) the Rockchip that's not under the heat-sink is : RK808 is a complete power supply solution for Portable systems. The highly integrated device includes four buck DC-DC converters, eight high performance ldos, two low Rds switches, I2C interface, programmable power sequencing and an RTC.
 
Have yet to remove the heat sink, its a beast now that I think about it.. I'll put my m4 on top of it for a comparison photo later.
 
 
Nomenclature

Heatsink HEATSINK!
RK808-D

UART Debug and logic levels

RTL8822BE removable

"service switch" labled ADB

 
 
Power I/O
seemed hidden by chasis housing, Bubba destroy a hole into it later for easy access

 
From these photos, does anyone know if this is a carrier or dev board native to any Armbian already supports? Thoughts, corrections, and feedback are welcome.
 
 
Destroy with caution!
 
 
 

 
This was tricky. The board was free of all mounting, except the adhesive around the front pannel jacks. Bubba destroy carefully here
 

 

 
 
             

 

The most straightforward way is to build the wifi driver yourself. You can follow the instructions in this post:
 

you wrote
 
ef update.img

but the right command is:

uf update.img

that's why. EF erases, UF uploads. topic's end and SOLVED.

e97 i've found that debian stops at the 8th version about it (premade images). the main problem was that /lib/modules is empty and even if i found a solution to get debian buster in it, the libmali-midgard0 driver still shout repeatedly some error about rk3x-i2c in dmesg :'(
 
i hope arch will do better if the armbian image don't.
i'll start a new thread and register, if any find it useful.