GUI not working on Armbian Rock5b

[Endian]

I have tried the Debian image for ROCK5B and the Gnome GUI works fine there.

 

But when booting the Armbian image (running from emmc) the screen does not notice any signal from the ROCK5B regardless of which HDMI port I try. I am using a quite old HDMI monitor (connected though a DVI-HDMI adapter).

 

How do I debug this?

[rockyharder22]

Check this out --  

Had similar issues with older monitors.  If you have a TV to plug into give that a shot and see if it comes up.  Not entirely sure what the fix is exactly, though -- using the method in that linked thread i was able to get the POST screen to change to a resolution the older monitor would show, but didn't change the resolution of the login screen to soemthing that i could see .   However, if I hooked to another screen, booted, and then logged in, once I was in the desktop to set the resolution, i could unplug the newer screen and the older one would work (until reboot...).   But hopefully that thread and the one that person links to helps. 

[Endian]

I can try it but I can mention that I have done some more debugging and I have noticed that kernels 5.10.66 and 5.10.72 works fine with my old screen, but 5.10.110 does not light up the screen at all. It applies to both Debian Buster and Ubuntu Jammy

[Endian]

I should add that the screen can handle 1920x1080@60Hz

[Endian]

Also reported in this thread https://forum.radxa.com/t/after-apt-upgrade-the-screen-gui-doesnt-start/15030

[Endian]

In that thread I have mentioned that the screen is detected and EDID negotiated ok so when selected as second screen Armbian thinks its present, but the screen itself is always black, so something wrong with the video signal sent to it.

[Endian]

It seems like the problem is fixed on master now. If I build a new image from the armbian build tool with a 5.10.110 kernel both my screens work ok. The nightly builds at armbian/build/releases (currently trunk.256) is not fine though.

Edited April 2, 2023 by Kenneth Ekman

[Endian]

Hmm.. Maybe I said spoke too soon.. 

 

What I see is that if I build an image from the Armbian tree like this

 

./compile.sh BOARD=rock-5b BRANCH=legacy RELEASE=jammy COMPRESS_OUTPUTIMAGE=img KERNEL_CONFIGURE=no BUILD_MINIMAL=no BUILD_DESKTOP=no

 

and boot from it my older (and problematic) screen works ok on HDMI-2 but not on HDMI-1 at the initial boot. 

 

However, if I do an apt update / apt upgrade and reboot my problematic screen stops working again...

 

This seems not-so-good...

Any insights on why this can happen?

[Endian]

Today I made a new armbian build and redid the experiment above, and it seems that using this configuration 

On 4/16/2023 at 1:03 PM, Endian said:

./compile.sh BOARD=rock-5b BRANCH=legacy RELEASE=jammy COMPRESS_OUTPUTIMAGE=img KERNEL_CONFIGURE=no BUILD_MINIMAL=no BUILD_DESKTOP=no

both my screens light up quite nicely regardless of whether they are on HDMI-1 or HDMI-2. First I tried doing a kernel Freeze before doing apt update / upgrade, and both screens were still working, but now I removed the kernel freeze, and screens still seem ok, so it seems the all legacy screen problems that I have seen may be fixed on the current armbian baseline.