Dave Kimble

My OPi4's /sys/class/ layout doesn't look anything like any of those examples/scripts . Is there an overview written up anywhere for OPi4 ? Perhaps I should have said "replace XFCE with LXDE". My mistake.

There is only a desktop download for OPi 4 and it comes with XFCE desktop. I cannot change the color for the taskbar from the absolutely horrible charcoal gray, other than to the 16-color set. If I choose a light color, the font color doesn't automatically change to dark, or be set specifically, it stays as white. I cannot put the computer's name on the taskbar. I cannot put the temperature on the taskbar. I cannot put the CPU usage on the taskbar. With the taskbar on the left margin (deskbar), the icons for the launchers are single and huge - the full width of the taskbar, not in rows 0f 24 px icons like with LXDE. I cannot change the rest of the screen's background color, other than to one of the 16-color set. I edited /usr/share/themes/Clearlooks-Olive/openbox-3/themerc to have the active title bar colored yellow, instead of the absolutely horrible Black. I launched lxappearance and it had the new Clearlooks-Olive, but it didn't affect the color of the title bar. So I installed LXDE desktop, the usual nurses screen asking which desktop you want to be default, didn't appear. I logged out and logged back in, but the login screen does not have an icon to click to choose which desktop you want. So I removed XFCE4, logged out, logged in and still didn't get an LXDE desktop. Repeating the above, I noticed a"blob" in the bottom right of the screen, and clicked that - offered the choice of LXDE. Where does the usual ncurses screen put the default desktop choice ? Finally OK. Can we please have LXDE replace XFCE in the desktop versions in future ? I have a red LED light on all the time, the orange light on the ethernet port is always on, the green ethernet flashes every now and then, the green light on the board flashes twice evry second. In the dark these lights light up the room. Is it possible to switch the LED lights off ? Is it possible to describe the differences between Armbian for OPi4 and Ubuntu_armhf for OPi4 ?

I am starting Rock64 again after a long layoff. I'm a bit rusty, please forgive any forgetfulness. I tried downloading the Rock64 desktop image, but it was 404. I downloaded Armbian_19.11.6_Rock64_bionic_legacy_4.4.207_desktop.7z Unzipped it, and used etcher to write it to the micro-SD card. Booted up, but didn't get to a graphical desktop. Created a new user OK. I did # apt update, # apt upgrade, # reboot now. Still no graphical desktop. I did # apt install lxde lxdm. (this used to work OK). As expected, the installer asked if i wanted to use lxdm as the display manager. Yes. $ sudo armbian-config Updated the timezone OK. Did Enable Desktop OK, but this didn't get me to lxde. Did Enable autologin. Reboot got me to LXDE. So far so good. But the USB keyboard and mouse don't work. Tried numerous mice and USB sockets. ALT+f1 now doesn't get back to command line so I am stuck. Have I forgotten something?

The idea is: those people wanting a cheap PC solution will ALWAYS want to add an SSD to their system, preferably a big one and preferably much faster than the SATA-3 theoretical maximum (6 Gbps). M.2 SSD in fact. They then don't want to have to buy a micro-SD card just to hold the bootloader, or have cheap and nasty microphones, or alternative sound outputs (from HDMI), or RPi cameras, or unusual screens, or GPIO pins. They WILL want gigabyte ethernet and 4GB of RAM and LARGE copper heatsinks. I realise he will be building using someone else's chips, but no one has described a difficulty that needs a micro-SD and TF-slot to make things work. I hate bloat, both hardware and software, and am also working on cutting down on Ubuntu bloat.

Well if it is not an Armbian issue, can you give me Steven Zhao's email address and I'll try and sell the idea to him directly?

Valant, I don't know so much about "a cheap micro-SD card" - Amazon (AU) has cheapest 32 GB micro-SDs for AU$11.95 . And cheapest 32 GB M.2 SSDs for AU$24.67 which is hundred of times faster. Converters from 2.5" SATA 3 to M.2 SSD cost about AU$13, so the price of M.2 slot alone would be about AU$6, if that. Boot ROM does "point to" something - the ROM code specifies (points to) the device to get the payload from. If it currently has a code for micro-SD but not for M.2 SSD, then my suggestion becomes "a new ROM code for M.2 SSD" which is always present in the PC-model. Since on PC-model SBCs, the Boot ROM always points to M.2 SSD, the boot ROM is not needed and is bloat. Martinayotte, it IS an Armbian issue if we can recommend a better boot process and have OrangePi build it for us, saving OPi some space on his boards and unnecessary cost in the hardware components. If "ARM Standard" is to have a Boot ROM with ROM codes 1=micro-SD, 2=eMMC, then why not 3=M.2 SSD ?

Yes, one of them is "needed" and the rest is hardware bloat - once you have read the Boot ROM, why have a chain of micro-SD cards or eMMC modules, or a PCIe slot and a PCIe expansion card and a M.2 device? And if the Boot ROM always points to the M.2 device, you don't need the Boot ROM either, so that's bloat too. I don't know why we are still discussing what "literally every current SBC" does.

Yes, but if some SBCs were designed to be focused on the "PC-model", which always expects an SSD to be present, with a boot-flag set to identify it, then the bootloader would know where to find it. This would mean a change to the bootloader code, of course - a change to a better (faster, more reliable, cheaper and LESS HARDWARE BLOAT) solution than current SBCs that have unfortunately inherited from TV-boxes and RPi-lookalikes, which serve their own perfectly valid purpose, but don't suit the "PC-model". I know current SBCs are not like that now. I am talking about a change that could be proposed by Armbian Group to Steven Zhao of OrangePi, and be in existence in 6 months.

On Rock64, I use youtube-dl CLI app.to download the video (720p) during my off-peak bandwidth time, and watch with MPV or VLC later in fullscreen (1920x1080). It plays OK, but this drives the temperature up to 89-92 ! This is a monitor of the results: http://davekimble.net/problem.video.replay.txt . I think the dropped frames are because of 25 fps v 60 fps of the monitor. I know it is a lot of work, but any ideas for reducing the workload welcome. Anybody else get this?

I never said anything about BIOS. Initrd/initramfs contains the code that decides where to get the fs from and where to put it and mount it. If every SBC has a micro-SD card (that costs more than the SBC) then initrd will be on the micro-SD. But if every PC-model has a SSD, then you would get it from that. If that's not right, you haven't said how. Which reminds me, the individual board pages have a feature set (in blue boxes). Have these been translated into a spreadsheet so that they can be viewed/interrogated as a whole set? That would be very useful for choosing a board.

Isn't that simply because of the way initrd/initramfs has been written? - I know, let's get the bootloader from the slowest/most unreliable device we have. I'm not trying to save money here, just getting the fastest solution for the "PC model" SBC. I remember putting my first SSD into a EeeNetbook and being amazed at the speed of the boot. I'm suggesting that "creative" means "more focused on the actual task", one of which is "PC Model". One special case of which could be your own mail server set up by iRedMail. Others might be Routers, Robotics, ATA phone adapters... what else?

I appreciate people want to do all sorts of things with their SBCs, but the usage of "cheap PC" must be common, and users will have the expectation of connecting up a HDD or SSD. So I was thinking: how about a M.2 slot instead supporting PCIe x4 so we can buy the biggest, fastest and cheapest per GB SSDs around. You could then eliminate the TF slot, micro-SD cards and eMMC modules, and the system could boot off the drive in the normal Linux manner. I'm not sure where the "support for PCIe x4" comes from, or how much this would affect the price. In the same way, I will probably never use GPIO pins, or IR receivers, cameras, touchscreens, on-board microphones, or alternative (to HDMI) audio outputs, so they can all be eliminated as bloat in the PC model. I believe Orange Pi is just one person, who can design things OK, but has no idea what market he is designing for. Perhaps he could be approached and put on the right track for mutual benefit. Your thoughts welcome.

No wait ! With the sound card set to SPDIF and the speakers plugged into the headphones socket on the monitor (obviously fed with HDMI) it works! This has the advantage that when the HDMI input is switched from PC to TV from my set top box, the sound is switched as well, instead of requiring pulling one set of AV plugs out of the speakers and plugging the other set in. Hope that saga helps someone.

After installing alsamixer_1.1.3 and pressing f6 to get a list of all "cards", the menu offers 1. Default 2. HDMI 3. SPDIF, (matching the ALSA driver's output in armbianmonitor -u), and 4. "Enter a name ..." , with HDMI already selected. My monitor doesn't have built-in sound, so I chose SPDIF ... but no sound. "Enter a name ..." is preset to hw=1 but that doesn't produce any sound. I installed aconnectgui, but that didn't explain what you could do with it. I seem to remember once having an alsa gui app that showed lots of channels and sliders and mute buttons that did things pulseaudio couldn't do for itself, but it was a long time ago. I installed alsa-utils, which gave me alsabat $ alsabat alsa-utils version 1.1.3 Entering playback thread (ALSA). Get period size: 2756 buffer size: 22050 Playing generated audio sine wave Underrun: Broken pipe(-32) Entering capture thread (ALSA). Get period size: 2756 buffer size: 22050 Recording ... Playback completed. Capture completed. BAT analysis: signal has 65536 frames at 44100 Hz, 1 channels, 2 bytes per sample. Channel 1 - Checking for target frequency 997.00 Hz Amplitude: 20576.6; Percentage: [62] Detected peak at 997.26 Hz of 35.89 dB Total 41.7 dB from 985.82 to 1008.70 Hz PASS: Peak detected at target frequency Detected at least 1 signal(s) in total Return value is 0 dk@desktop:~$ which looks interesting. I tried plugging in some headphones, and a USB speaker,which I think needs some driver I haven't got. I need some guidance here.

Sorry, that URL doesn't work, maybe due to similar characters. http://ix.io/1ttO that one-tee-tee-capital O