Latest Armbian for S805 TV

[granitr]

Hi,

 

so after many hours of trial and error I have managed to get the latest Armbian with Kernel 6.1.27 running on my old mxq s805 tv box.

 

Albeit only thing that is not working is hdmi output and wifi. 
 

So for anyone else trying to accomplish something similar, my steps were:

 

https://github.com/hzyitc/armbian-onecloud 
 

Downloaded the latest release of this build for the onecloud device as it also runs on the s805 amlogic chipset (props to the developer for still updating)

 

Burn the image to your sd card.

Then after the image is burned, create a textfile on the root of the sd card and name it „uEnv.txt“

Paste the following and adjust the .dtb file to your corresponding device. My case is the mxq

 

LINUX=/uImage
INITRD=/uInitrd
#VMODE=1080P50HZ
VMODE=1080P
FDT=/dtb/meson8b-mxq.dtb
APPEND=root=LABEL=armbi_root rootfstype=ext4 rootflags=data=writeback rw console=ttyAML0,115200n8 console=tty0 no_console_suspend consoleblank=0 fsck.repair=yes net.ifnames=0
 

Save the file, insert the sd card in your device connect it to LAN and ssh in to the device (check the ip in your router)

 

So, ssh root@your.ip.adress.x

Password is 1234 by default.

 

And that is that. I currently have it running for 4hrs with no outage. PiHole and PiVPN both installed and running.

 

I hope this could help anyone out trying on a similar device. Credit goes to the devs and contributors. I just put the pieces together and made it work as my own builds wouldnt run so I resorted to this much better solution.

 

p.s: If anyone is interested for my reasoning of updating from a old build, it was because i was using 5.14 rc2 kernel that was bugging with wireguard.

And as mentioned no hdmi output and no wifi. Wifi should be fixable hdmi rather not to my understanding.

Take care and have fun

 

[Mạnh Vũ]

HI pro,

Can you tell me which version you are using? I tried downloading version Armbian_23.08.0-trunk_Onecloud_jammy_current_6.1.51.img.xz and following your steps but it cannot boot into ARMBIAN

Thanks

[Jens J.]

Does that image contain an s805_autoscript and/or aml_autoscript file at the root of the sdcard?

 

Here's a copy of mine for an MXQ model (note that in my uEnv.txt, it uses a custom m201 dtb)

 

If that doesnt work, then you'll need to get access to serial console to see what the stock uboot is doing, and what sdcard (mmc) files it's looking for on boot.

armbian_s805_boot_files.zip

[temporary_name]

Hello there! I want to ask a question about burning images into SD cards. I followed the steps of OP, I tried to burn the image via DD and via balenaEtcher, and both of them didn't created a boot partition (balenaEtcher did warn me that the image does not contain a partition table). As far as I recall, those files like uEnv.txt, .dtb, etc must be placed in the boot partition, am I right? Did I do something wrong, or did I should somehow create those parts by myself? Thanks!

Image used:

Armbian-unofficial_23.11.0-trunk_Onecloud_bullseye_edge_6.6.2.burn.img

[embedder_dev]

I can boot from microSD, but I want to install Armbian into eMMC. Can you help me with that?

 

[hexdump]

@embedder_dev - there is no proper u-boot for s805 and the u-boot (plus other bootloader parts) are somewhere in the middle of the emmc (if it even is emmc and not nand) - so better do not touch the emmc if you are not very familiar with such topics and stay on the sd card to avoid accidently bricking the box

[Denys Zaitsev]

@Jens J. where did you get that custom DTB file? 

 

I booted my MXM tv box s805 amlogic, it works, but it doesn't detect any USB device, seems like a problem in the DTB file. 

But I can't find any other file on the internet that would work with my kernel:

 

Linux onecloud 6.7.9-edge-meson #1 SMP Wed Mar  6 14:54:01 UTC 2024 armv7l GNU/Linux
 

Other stuff seems to work, at least ethernet works fine.

 

Pls let me know how you created the custom DTB. 

 

Thanks in advance.

[Boudjelida Abdelhak]

hi,

i booted using Armbian_21.11.0-trunk_Aml-s812_focal_current_5.14.0.img with meson8b-ec100.dtb

but no wifi, any idea ? 

[Boudjelida Abdelhak]

booted also using Armbian-unofficial_24.5.0-trunk_Onecloud_bookworm_current_6.6.21 and the armbian_s805_boot_files uploaded above

but cant detect wifi

[Boudjelida Abdelhak]

hi,

i used ubuntu-mate-15-04-s805-standard-0_95_Beta.img.xz everything works fine, hdmi , wlan ...

but kernel is 3

[Werner]

10 minutes ago, Boudjelida Abdelhak said:

but kernel is 3

https://docs.armbian.com/User-Guide_FAQ/#why-does-hardware-feature-xy-work-in-old-kernel-but-not-in-more-recent-one

[PeterB]

Hi all,

I can confirm the following image works on Armlogic based box:

Armbian-unofficial_24.5.0-trunk_Onecloud_bookworm_current_6.6.21_xfce_desktop.img

 

Target device:

Ravo RVBX15V3 (Android box intended for arabic TV content)

SoC: Armlogic  Meson8B / s805

WiFi chip: RTL8189ETV (not supported by kernel 6.x.x, as explained in Werner's link)

HDMI doesen't seem to be working either

 

Boot process failed at first attempt, due to missing s805_autoscript in boot partition of SD Card.

I followed advice from Jens and copied some files from a previous deployment, resulting in the following structure:

 

/boot
├── aml_autoscript
├── aml_autoscript.cmd
├── aml_autoscript.zip
├── armbianEnv.txt
├── armbian_first_run.txt.template
├── boot.bmp
├── boot.cmd
├── boot.scr
├── config-6.6.21-current-meson
├── dtb
│   ├── meson6-atv1200.dtb
│   ├── meson8b-ec100.dtb
│   ├── meson8b-mxq.dtb
│   ├── meson8b-odroidc1.dtb
│   ├── meson8b-onecloud.dtb
│   ├── meson8m2-mxiii-plus.dtb
│   └── meson8-minix-neo-x8.dtb
├── dtb-6.6.21-current-meson
│   ├── meson6-atv1200.dtb
│   ├── meson8b-ec100.dtb
│   ├── meson8b-mxq.dtb
│   ├── meson8b-odroidc1.dtb
│   ├── meson8b-onecloud.dtb
│   ├── meson8m2-mxiii-plus.dtb
│   └── meson8-minix-neo-x8.dtb
├── initrd.img-6.6.21-current-meson
├── s805_autoscript
├── s805_autoscript.cmd
├── System.map-6.6.21-current-meson
├── uEnv.txt
├── uImage
├── uInitrd
├── uInitrd-6.6.21-current-meson
└── vmlinuz-6.6.21-current-meson

 

 

 

 

 

armbian_s805_boot_files.zip

[Dominik Wójt]

Hi all,

 

I got a s805 box from my wife's cousin. He bought it ridiculously cheap here: https://www.olx.pl/d/oferta/tv-box-przystawka-do-telewizora-CID99-ID10w7q1.html

The power adapter broke after a few hours, so he let me take it. I got a new adapter and had some play with the box.

The box seems to be an MXQ clone. The software is probably a direct copy, with only the boot logo replaced.

 

Data extracted from the factory software:

model: m201
Android: 4.4.2
Build number: KOT49H.20160507 test-keys
Kernel version: 3.10.33
rwf@YDsoft #1
Tue Jul 7 11:40:39 CST 2015

 

I was able to boot onecloud and odroidc1 images. The `s805_autoscript` script is missing in the builds, so I had to manually instruct (through UART) U-BOOT to load kernel from the SD card. The odroidc1 worked a little better in that there was HDMI output.

 

To make this a little more robust, I forked the build repository and added a separate board and a boot script for it. I copied odroid's fixes for HDMI to dtb for this board. I did not test boot from other devices than SD card, but in theory USB should work, too.

here is a branch: https://github.com/domin144/armbian-build/tree/mxq

this commit was tested to work: https://github.com/domin144/armbian-build/commit/bce6f677e0a6a3dd0ee4ce1fdc4cee8befcdd0b8

 

This is not of pull request quality, but will hopefully give someone a better starting point.

HDMI output was working

wired network was working

WIFI does not seem to be working

 

Edited November 11, 2024 by Dominik Wójt

[Dominik Wójt]

Forgot to add a build command for the image:

./compile.sh build BOARD=aml-s805-mxq BRANCH=edge BUILD_DESKTOP=yes BUILD_MINIMAL=no DESKTOP_APPGROUPS_SELECTED='browsers internet multimedia' DESKTOP_ENVIRONMENT=xfce DESKTOP_ENVIRONMENT_CONFIG_NAME=config_base KERNEL_CONFIGURE=no RELEASE=bookworm

 

[JorgenFloy420]

@Dominik Wójt My apologies for bumping this thread with an essentially useless post but I figure I might as well ask as a last resort, could you please upload a pre-compiled image? I've tried on multiple PC's with multiple distros and have ran into different errors on each setup. If not a pre-compiled binary do you perhaps have another way I could get in contact with you to ask some questions? Like I said I really hate to be a bother but I'm amazed by the fact that your comment isn't even 2 weeks old when I've owned this 'MXQ' branded box for close to a decade now lol, just would really love to see some newer software running on it but info and resources for all of this is all over the place if not scarce. 

[Dominik Wójt]

Hi @JorgenFloy420, sorry for late reply. I must have missed a notification. I am away from home now. I will upload the image sometime after 20th of December.

Did you verify you are using the s805 based version? If the factory software is reporting model m201 it is probably compatible.

[Dominik Wójt]

Hi @JorgenFloy420, I rebased my changes, built a new image and etched it on a USB drive. It does start, but only from one of the USB ports - I haven't yet debugged why it does not start on the other one.

Anyway, at least now I confirmed, that both USB and SD card boot is possible.

XFCE is running and usable using keyboard+mouse combo on the other USB port and a monitor on HDMI.

here's your image: https://mega.nz/file/mdsHxDIR#vaEP7k-clLMe18MU4tkpznuKXFwJxnxoKeC_voZZuIk

Let me know, if you have any success with this one.

[JorgenFloy420]

@Dominik Wójt Hello again and first off thank you very much for taking the time to share the image, I kept coming back to this thread daily to check if you had responded and just so happened to stop after you did and before I could tell you to no worries take your time yesterday you had already uploaded the image lol so thank you once again!

 

I'm not sure if there's any setup that needs to be done on my end after flashing? Trying the SD slot bootloops the device and blinks the S805 logo about every 15 seconds, trying any of the USB ports besides the 4th will make the device hang.

My apologies for any ignorance, I have never messed with installing Linux on any ARM or 'niche' hardware besides through homebrew on game consoles lol.

[Dominik Wójt]

4th port? My device has only 2 USB ports. I suppose it is different. It might need modified dtb, but as long as it is s805 (and it looks like it is), I would expect it to at least boot. We would need to debug, what uboot does.

The most straightforward way to do it, would be to open the case and connect UART interface (e.g. ft232). Dumping the full environment (printenv in uboot console), would give us some insight.

There is alternative way to get the dump, with fw_printenv, but I haven't ever tried this and don't know, if this is possible on the stock software.

[SEIUMU]

@Dominik Wójt just checked your image and can confirm that it does seem to be fully functional. I have tested it on an all-black MXQ S805 1GB RAM 8GB Flash. To the best of my knowledge it is M201. It has 4 usb ports and it would boot only if the flash drive is inserted in the 4th one. The installation process goes without major issues. It even locates my wifi, but for some reason refuses to take the password. Still testing. Once the installation process is complete - it brought me to the armbian desktop and this is where I ended for now. No idea if other functionality works. The desktop seems a bit glitchy as my mouse gets frozen from time to time and the keyboard lives its own life occasionally, but it may very well be due to my dell wifi keyboard + mouse configuration. By the way, once the dongle is removed, it will no longer be detected.

My key question at this point is what to do if I need to shut down the system? How do I boot into it the next time? I have tried this and it won't work. Once the power goes out and then on again, it will only boot into android even with the USB stick still in. It won't even let to relaunch the installation process. That's what happened to me just now, so while writing this, I am reflashing the USD to repeat the whole initialization process but what to do next?

[SEIUMU]

@Dominik Wójt after spending more time trying to configure it, here are a couple of follow-up observations.

First, localization won't work during setup. Even if you pick your geography or set the time zone manually, the system time won't adjust. Without proper time, the browser won't work. You need to install chrony, add google's time server and then restart chrony. With a bit of play - the time will adjust. 

But even after this, the browser still won't work. If will ping any specific ip but won't ping any websited. To fix this, you'd need to configure new DNS server. Change it to 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. That would fix the problem and you will be able to get online.

With regards to wifi, it will see all the 2.4Ghz wifi networks, but it won't take the password. Tried it different ways including setting configuration manually in armbian system settings. No idea what's causing it.

 

The system is quite slow. It freezes and glitches. Youtube will work as a slide show. However, this is all while running it from a USB drive, which may be the reason for issues.

The key questions at this point: what do I need to do with the files on the USB drive after first boot, so that I am back to this OS and no undroid upon power loss or reboot. The first time I flashed it and then rebuted, it would completely ignore it NOR boot installation.

Also, did you try copying it into nand memory via armbian settings menu or otherwise? Is this reversible?

[Dominik Wójt]

Hi @SEIUMU,

thanks for testing the image and all the remarks. I have different device and so observe different issues.

 

For the "single boot issue". On my device I can boot both from SD card and from one of the two USB ports I have. If I put flash drive to the other USB port, it will be ignored and android boots. I have no issues with rebooting several times from the same drive - both by cutting off the power or by typing `reboot` in the terminal. Something must be changed on the drive during boot. We have same armbian image, so I would suspect your uboot. There are several thing to check:

- check the contents of the boot script before and after the first boot:

mkimage -A arm -O linux -T script -C none -d s805_autoscript s805_autoscript.txt

- if you have a UART interface, connect it to the board and check the uboot environtment. Hit enter in the UART console early in boot process to get to uboot shell, type `env print` and share the output,

- if you don't have any UART interface, well... I don't know how to mount the NAND drive. Might not be possible without modified the kernel.

 

For wifi: you are lucky, my wifi card is not detected at all 😉. I am using ethernet only.

 

My wireless USB keyboard and mouse worked good, even when reconnecting.

 

Yes, the system is slow for me too. Not sure if this is software issue or maybe just HW limitation. I don't suppose running from NAND would help.

 

I didn't try and would be afraid to write to NAND. Anyway, it will probably fail anyway, as I cannot see the NAND drive listed with `lsblk`.

 

I cannot help you with localization, clock and DNS. I have no knowledge in these areas. I think my DNS configuration came from my router through DHCP.

[SEIUMU]

@Dominik Wójt Thanks for additional thoughts. After playing with it for entire day, I eventually hit the restart button. Unlike yesterday, it did pick up the usb and tried to load from it. The boot looked like it was once again installing everything with a long list of checks and [OK]s. Then, a black screen, the boot logo and another attempt to boot from the usb to eventually reboot the 3rd time (all on its all without me touching anything). Then, finally, on the 3rd round it would boot into armbian. Altogether, this long multistep rebooting took about 5 minutes or so.

The mouse and keyboard eventually work fine. Wi-Fi still won't connect despite displaying my network and even attempting to connect and displaying the message that it is connected to then ask for password again. Really strange. I don't really care about wifi for now though, so it is more just an observation.

With regards to NAND, I decided to not take chances even though it should theoretically speed the things up by a margin.

May I ask what's the purpose of this project for you? How are you using it?

My goal it to make it wor as a home server for home assistant and maybe as a surveillance server. Hopefully, it is accomplishable.

By the way, I think the speed can be technically improved by improving cooling. The monitor would say the device reaces about 75 degrees C and that's already with an extrernal cooler I installed a while ago. I'll have to renew the thrermopaste and hopefully it will help better cooling.

In the last few hours I was desperately trying to install docker-compose, which wouldn't install the normal way.

[SEIUMU]

Ok, if anyone in this chat or anyone reading this chat while working on a similar project wonders how to properly set up a docker on armbian, here is what you need: this is all you need...

apt-get remove docker docker-engine docker.io containerd runc
apt-get install ca-certificates curl gnupg lsb-release
mkdir -p /etc/apt/keyrings
curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/debian/gpg | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg
echo "deb [arch=$(dpkg --print-architecture) signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg] https://download.docker.com/linux/debian $(lsb_release -cs) stable" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list > /dev/null
apt update
apt-get install docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io docker-compose-plugin

So, back to @JorgenFloy420 MXQ is old but not useless and many thanks to @Dominik Wójt for sharing the .img file that worked. Tried dozens with lots of jungle around dtb files, etc and all would have issues.. This package seems the best one so far.

[SEIUMU]

@Dominik Wójt I am wondering if you experience any picture quality issues. Every once in a while when it goes into sleep mode, reboots, or even spontaneously, the picture goes corrupt and displays as if the resolution is like 300*400 and there are only 16 colors, even though the monitor suggests that it is getting a full-hd signal via hdmi (never happened with android installed in the box). Did you experience any of these? Is there a way to somehow refresh graphics when something like that happens? Is there a way to troubleshoot something like that?

[Dominik Wójt]

@SEIUMU I wanted the box to replace my current "web server" https://domin144.pl/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=this_site . I haven't yet had time to make the move, though.

I did experience some display issues, but I observed them on android too. Sometimes I got distorted colors. Re-plugging the HDMI cable usually helped. I also noticed, that the issues would be present less often if I used 1920x1080 resolution instead of my monitor's native 1920x1200. I don't know how to troubleshoot this.

My device did get too hot from time to time, too. In the pictures above, you can see the tiny heatsink it used to have originally. Now I have put a bigger one (extracted from a broken DVB-T decoder), which also covers the memory chips. Now I cannot reach temperatures over 60°C in a stress test. I use no active fan - I want the box to be completely silent.

[SEIUMU]

@Dominik Wójt after setting it up, installing docker and home assistant in a container, I've set up a light dropbear ssh, have disactivated desktop, hdmi, and all the other unwanted services, and have tried to use it remotely. Not sure what went wrong, but it would simply not respond via ssh like that. I am able to log in, drop a few commands, but then it would freeze and not let me do anything.

I am hoping that it has to do with my usb drive, so, I am now shifting to the fastest sd card I have. Will try to test it like that. It is quite strange. Will share more observations as I move along.