Jump to content

Single Armbian image for RK + AML + AW (armhf ARMv7)

balbes150

By balbes150
in General Chat

 Share

Recommended Posts

balbes150

balbes150

Posted
Posted

I opened this theme to support running ArmbianTV on 32-bit ARM models. To date, there are first results on launching ArmbianTV on the Rockchip rk3288 and AML s8xx platform (in the future, by analogy with aarch64, I plan to switch to a common image for all 32-bit models of TV boxes).

 

 

 

The link to the images

https://yadi.sk/d/85ZvBuXyyenf_A

 

 

MEGA (name -rk3288)

https://mega.nz/#F!j9QSDQSQ!6WpasOlbZYIInfw6yo4phQ

 

Now you can download the latest versions of images and DEB packages from the official Armbian resource via the link. 

https://users.armbian.com/balbes150/

 

 

Recommended startup procedure on UM3.

 

1. Install the Linux firmware version in eMMC (either a dual boot or a single Linux).

2. follow these instructions to download and run the Linux version from linuxium

 

https://forum.freaktab.com/forum/tv-player-support/rk3288-devices/21091-use-windows-to-create-an-sd-card-so-you-can-run-linux-on-a-rk3288-device

 

(do not forget to immediately expand the system partition to the entire media after writing the image). After launch, make a full backup eMMC with the DD command (or copy the ddbr utility to the system and use it).

3. Erase the first 4Mb on eMMC (using a simple DD command).

4. Download, unpack and burn the ArmbianTV image to your SD card.

5. Connect to the TV box and turn on the power. The system will start automatically.

 

For those who are not afraid to lose their regular firmware and be able to easily restore it later, you can use the "accelerated" launch option (erase eMMC use the tools for Rockchip TV boxes). 

 

2
Link to comment
Share on other sites
balbes150

balbes150

Posted
  • Author
Posted

The first results of studying the sent TV boxes. Ugoos UM3 (rk3288). First, the cons. This model does not have a LAN port. You have to use an external network card for LAN-USB. Positive. For this model, there is a ready-made Linux Ubuntu 15 image, with a simple installation procedure in eMMC. You can choose to install the dual boot option (Android+Ubuntu), or install only Linux (Ubuntu) in eMMC. I checked both options. Work. For those who need a minimal version of Ubuntu with the old core 3.10 and XFCE, after a small revision, the regular version of Ubuntu will be enough. This model has a properly designed WiFi (high-quality external antenna). The only modification I made was to remove the top plastic cover so that the cooling system would work normally. The presence of standard firmware with Linux makes it much easier to run other versions of Linux (Armbian and Libreelec). The Ugoos UM3 model has improved options with LAN and more ports it is UT3\UT3s. But I warn you right away, I don't have UT3\UT3s models, so I don't know how compatible they are with UM3 and whether it will be possible to have their General support. Result. My overall impression of UM3 is positive and I look forward to further development on adapting Armbian and Libreelec for this model. 

 

 

Another good news about the launch of ArmbianTV on UM3 (rk3288). Several different systems could be started from external media. There is a working u-boot that allows you to start the system from an SD card. At the first stage,  managed to launch Armbian in a combined version (SD+USB). Works with HDMI and USB output (these are important basic systems that allow you to start working with Armbian on UM3), there is audio via HDMI. Works USB WiFi (one of the old models). Now I have the Foundation to create a full-fledged ArmbianTV image for UM3.  :)

Link to comment
Share on other sites
jeanrhum

jeanrhum

Posted
Posted
1 minute ago, balbes150 said:

Now I have the Foundation to create a full-fledged ArmbianTV image for UM3. 

I have an ut3s, so if you want a tester for a similar ugoos box, don't hesitate. Have you tried/compared the community image from jock for Q8? It work not too bad on ut3s, but it lacks some dtb tweeks (fan, led and emmc in latest kernel).

Link to comment
Share on other sites
balbes150

balbes150

Posted
  • Author
Posted

Built the first ArmbianTV test image for rk3288. I checked its work on Ugoos UM3. :)

After removing the regular u-boot from eMMC, the system starts without problems and works from the SD card . At this stage, I have not yet found the u-boot source code to build a version of u-boot that can work in dual boot mode (without removing the regular u-boot). This version is included in Linuxium images. Which I used to first prepare the system to run ArmbiaTV (creating a full backup of the entire eMMC and removing the regular u-boot from eMMC). If you want to try a new image, I can upload it to the site and provide step-by-step instructions for launching UM3 (the process is quite simple and can be easily performed by any user).

Link to comment
Share on other sites
balbes150

balbes150

Posted
  • Author
Posted
On 5/30/2020 at 7:48 PM, jeanrhum said:

I have an ut3s, so if you want a tester for a similar ugoos box, don't hesitate. Have you tried/compared the community image from jock for Q8? It work not too bad on ut3s, but it lacks some dtb tweeks (fan, led and emmc in latest kernel).

I checked the images for Q8. Yes, they work, but they have a number of disadvantages that make it difficult to easily launch Armbian on TV boxes.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
balbes150

balbes150

Posted
  • Author
Posted

Images with two kernel versions are available for testing.

Legacy.

Uses the 5.4 core built using source code and patches (with minor fixes) that are used to build the rockchip.

 

DEV.

The core 5.7-rc7 is used (the sources are shared with the version I use to build aarhc64 images).

 

There are no patches in this version yet. The legacy version has almost all the working hardware on UM3. On the DEV version, not everything works, but there is access to eMMC. how it is used (the setting for running is the same as the aarch64 version of images). To configure dtb, use the file (uEnv.txt). At this stage, I used settings and patches from MIQI to build the u-boot. I tried the u-boot version from Q8, it works the same way, but I haven't decided which version is better to use yet (I haven't fully figured out what the pros and cons of these u-boot versions are).

 

The link to the images and the launch order will be placed in the first message.

1
Link to comment
Share on other sites
balbes150

balbes150

Posted
  • Author
Posted
10 minutes ago, jock said:

Wouldn't it be better to add Ugoos devices as regularly Armbian CSC supported devices?

At the moment, the official Armbian does not have support for TV boxes (this is not a claim, there is a lot of work to do and there is no urgent need for this yet), so there is no place to add support.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
jock

jock

Posted
Posted
8 minutes ago, balbes150 said:

At the moment, the official Armbian does not have support for TV boxes (this is not a claim, there is a lot of work to do and there is no urgent need for this yet), so there is no place to add support.

ugoos devices are different than el-cheapo tv-boxes, ugoos is a well-known manufacturer and their hardware specs are advertised on the site and stable. There is a single board, not infinite variants and versions like chineses, thus it could be supported as a regular board and would perfectly fit into Armbian community support flow.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
balbes150

balbes150

Posted
  • Author
Posted
1 hour ago, jock said:

ugoos devices are different than el-cheapo tv-boxes, ugoos is a well-known manufacturer and their hardware specs are advertised on the site and stable. There is a single board, not infinite variants and versions like chineses, thus it could be supported as a regular board and would perfectly fit into Armbian community support flow.

Why create a bunch of similar images (systems) that differ only in minimal settings (DTB and command line, etc), and then spend a lot of resources to keep such similar systems up to date ?

Link to comment
Share on other sites
jeanrhum

jeanrhum

Posted
Posted

Downloading bullseye desktop legacy... I will try to give it a try this evening or tomorrow.

I agree with Balbes about the position of his images and a CSC ugoos board. His images fit several boards at the same time and the behavior of these images (in particular for kernel update) is a bit different from official armbian.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
balbes150

balbes150

Posted
  • Author
Posted
43 minutes ago, jeanrhum said:

I agree with Balbes about the position of his images and a CSC ugoos board. His images fit several boards at the same time and the behavior of these images (in particular for kernel update) is a bit different from official armbian.

And there are a number of important differences between ArmbianTV and the official versions. For example, there are two sections. The first boot partition is necessarily made available for any PC (Windows Linux MAC etc), in particular it uses FAT. This is crucial. This allows any user, on any device, to easily configure system startup for their device. In case of problems with startup, it can connect the media to any PC and easily edit startup parameters, enable new options, change settings, add/delete files, etc. With official versions, this is not possible on a Windows PC, which greatly narrows the circle of users who want to start using Linux (Armbian). The official versions also use oters technologies. Installation in eMMC using direct bitwise copying of the source system (via DD).  use of the UUID, etc.

Please note that I do not impose anything on anyone or criticize the official version. I'm just stating the differences. Developers of the official version decide what to do and what to use. :)

1
Link to comment
Share on other sites
jeanrhum

jeanrhum

Posted
Posted

First test with ugoos ut3s with default dtb (firefly-reload): http://ix.io/2o7o

For information, I have jock uboot and an old Q8 image installed on emmc.

Wifi works, but ethernet seems buggy like on recent arm64 images (kernel 5.X pb with current dtbs ?). I didn't test it, but the connection was activated whereas no cable... System halts instead of reboot.

Bluetooth seems not working well (xfce applet disappear when I try to use it to activate)

With Q8 dtb the experience seems similar from a user perspective: http://ix.io/2o7q

With popmetal and tinker dtb, the system does not boot: waiting root file system... running /scripts/local-block

With miqi dtb, it boots, but without wifi and I was not able to connect a cable to test the wired network, but eth0 still shows as connected.

 

Edit: As I noticed on Jock images, the Q8 dtb is not able to detect emmc on contrary to firefly-reload.

1
Link to comment
Share on other sites
balbes150

balbes150

Posted
  • Author
Posted

Interesting test news for Ugoos UT2 (rk3188). Updated the firmware version with standard tools to the version with support for multi-loading from the SD card. Checked the launch of old Ubuntu versions with core 3 from the SD card. Several versions of Ubuntu are running. Works with HDMI USB LAN. There is a version with sound and surprisingly allows you to play full-screen video with a desktop resolution of up to 1080p. But there is a minus, until it was possible to detect internal memory (perhaps it is NAND). :)

Link to comment
Share on other sites
jeanrhum

jeanrhum

Posted
Posted
2 hours ago, jock said:

Wasn't that due to the mmc-pwrseq entry for the eMMC node?

I was thinking that I reported that on the Q8 topic, but no it didn't work with that change in the dtb. I will try to compare with firefly dtb and I will try to extract the dtb from an android image in case it has some relevant info to define a ut3s specific dtb, but I'm not sure to have enough skills with dts file reading.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
balbes150

balbes150

Posted
  • Author
Posted

When testing the latest version of my LE (20200608) for rk3288, I found that u-boot outputs some information to the HDMI monitor, but it is distorted (you can see that it is text, but the lines are mixed). I have a monitor connected via an HDMI-VGA adapter, perhaps it is because of it that the text in the u-boot is distorted. If anyone has the option, it would be interesting to check what is displayed when the rk3328 is directly connected to an HDMI monitor. :)

Link to comment
Share on other sites
balbes150

balbes150

Posted
  • Author
Posted

The new version 20200609. In it, I switched to using the u-boot version 2020.04 (source shared with universal images for aarch64). This version has long implemented the function of starting the system from USB media. Now rk3288 also has the option to start the system from USB media. Minimal Bionic and Buster images have also been added to the site.

 

Starting from USB is available on both systems (Libreelec and Armbian). For example. You can write to an Armbian SD card, and write to a Libreelec USB flash drive. When you connect both media, LE will work, and when you disable the USB flash drive, Armbian starts.

 

 

p.s. The correct installation of these systems in eMMC is currently being tested.

1
Link to comment
Share on other sites
TonyMac32

TonyMac32

Posted
Posted

OK.  Boots, gets to desktop, plays the test video, sound via HDMI works, my RTL8821CU wifi was properly recognized. 

 

Only thing I see is no fan control, and the LED is just blinking at 1 Hz for no known reason.

 

LibreELEC: same, boots, audio, etc.  [edit]  it did not recognize the wifi adapter.

 

Now to dig up my Ugoos and stuff this on it.  :)

 

 

1
Link to comment
Share on other sites
balbes150

balbes150

Posted
  • Author
Posted
1 hour ago, TonyMac32 said:

OK.  Boots, gets to desktop, plays the test video, sound via HDMI works, my RTL8821CU wifi was properly recognized. 

 

Only thing I see is no fan control, and the LED is just blinking at 1 Hz for no known reason.

 

LibreELEC: same, boots, audio, etc.  [edit]  it did not recognize the wifi adapter.

 

Now to dig up my Ugoos and stuff this on it. 

Try changing the DTB you are using. Register in (uEnv.txt) the name of the DTB file specifically for miqi.

 

For LE, I haven't managed to add USB WiFi support yet. :)

Link to comment
Share on other sites
TonyMac32

TonyMac32

Posted
Posted
26 minutes ago, balbes150 said:

Try changing the DTB you are using. Register in (uEnv.txt) the name of the DTB file specifically for miqi.

I did.  ;-)  I can't remember if we have a patch for that or not, my 5.4 image does have fan though.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
balbes150

balbes150

Posted
  • Author
Posted
17 minutes ago, TonyMac32 said:

I did.  ;-)  I can't remember if we have a patch for that or not, my 5.4 image does have fan though.

In the latest images, I use the 5.7 core. it May not have any fan patches or the core configuration doesn't have all the options enabled.  :)

Try version 20200604 it uses the 5.4 kernel with all the patches from the official Armbian.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
 Share
Go to topic listing
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

Terms of Use - Privacy Policy - Guidelines

  I accept