Orange Pi Zero Plus 2 Desktop

[horty]

A couple of weeks ago I took delivery of an Orange Pi Zero Plus 2 H3 it has the form factor I wanted, eMMC support and HDMI which implied I could run a desktop; the H3 was also the variant that seemed to have the best support. Since then I have been trying to get a stable usable desktop environment working. I tried the latest version of Armbian legacy server specifically for this board and that works fine as far as the server version goes so then I tried to add a basic desktop but that didn't work the xOrg driver said there were no screens present and everything I tried after going to Google University  failed. Then I tried a couple of distros from the Orange Pi website but none of them were really usable. Next I returned to Armbian and tried the legacy desktop image for an Orange Pi Lite and the desktop worked but obviously the AP62612 and the eMMC were not found. Finally I tried the desktop image for the Orange Pi PC Plus. The desktop works well and I can copy the image to eMMC using the Armbian script but still the AP6212 could not be initialized. Finally I tried a Realtek USB/Ethernet dongle with this image and it worked "out of the box" all I had to do was put in my SSID & WPA password. That is the setup I am working with now, but I really would like an Armbian desktop image for this board. Actually don't care if it is H3 or H5 and also don't care if it is legacy or mainline; so the simple question is are there any plan to release a desktop image for the Zero +2 or does anyone know how to install a simple desktop on top of the Armbian legacy server image?

 

One other observation with the current arrangement the eMMC seems slower than the MicroSD I originally copied the image to but I suspect (hope) this is because I I am not using the correct image for this board. Thanks in advance. BTW you may have gathered I am not a Linux guru and think that recompiling kernels is a bit beyond my capabilities at the moment.

 

Horty

[araczkowski]

Try the image from here:

https://dl.armbian.com/orangepizeroplus2-h3/

 

 

[horty]

@araczkowski

 

Thanks for the reply. Forgot to say that before I tried the Orange Pi Lite and Orange Pi PC Plus images I did try the Debian Jessie and the Ubuntu Xenial images from the alternative image page you pointed to. In both cases the Desktop performance was unacceptable nowhere near the usability of the Orange Pi Lite image for example. Also couldn't get the AP6212 working. At one point I thought I had a faulty chip but then I remember it worked fine with the legacy server image specifically for the Zero +2 ???. I'll try the Ubuntu image again from this page and get back.

 

Regards Keith

[Igor]

5 hours ago, horty said:

Desktop performance was unacceptable nowhere near the usability of the Orange Pi Lite image for example.

This is the best what you can get out of this board. I made an image from latest sources: https://dl.armbian.com/orangepizeroplus2-h3/Ubuntu_xenial_default_desktop_nightly.7z

 

You have to use dedicated board config if you want that all things work. And in case of this particular board - it uses some strange/different Wifi chip revision which means some additional hacks are needed if you start with some generic build.

 

1. Burn SD card

2. Login via serial and connect to your Wireless network (from armbian-config or with nmtui-connect)

3. Launch armbian-config and connect Bluetooth mouse

4. Enjoy

Logs: http://sprunge.us/ZBhM and I made a video: 

 

[horty]

@igor

 

You guys are amazing!

 

Got the latest image and burned a MicroSD, display much better than previous alternative images for this board, performance is good but display tends to jump somewhat when changing apps as can be seen in your video but I can live with that. WiFi works no problem and since I don't need Bluetooth I didn't test that but I will later. Many thanks I can now continue testing my app (an industrial SCADA system) on this board. When I am happy that there won't be an thermal problems etc. (I shouldn't have sine the complete SCADA system running flat out only adds 2-3% CPU load to one core), I too will do a video and post it on YouTube

 

Thanks again

[peter12]

Hi guys, I don't want to open new thread so i am posting here. Please is there any desktop armbian version for Orange pi zero h2+ available?