Armbian on Seeed Studio Link Star H68K

[Marty McSly]

Greetings! My first foray into Armbian.

 

Apparently the Link Star H68K is hardware equivalent to the Hinlink H68K.

 

I'm trying to install one of the community supported Armbian images (Debian Trixie, Ubuntu 26.04)  for the Hinlink onto a Link Star H68K, using the RKDevTool from the Seeed Studio wiki. And failing.

 

The only image that loads into RKDevTool is the Lubuntu 20.04 from the Seeed Studio wiki. It's just a tad out of date.

 

Any pointers on getting a more up-to-date OS installed would be most welcome. AFAIK my device is OG, not V2.

 

I've also tried booting from TF card, but the device refuses to boot at all with a TF card inserted. Some Googling suggests that a current TF card is too fast for the device and causes boot failure. Card spec is Class 10 / UHS-1. I've sourced some Sandisk Class 4 cards and currently awaiting delivery, to see if that solves the boot issue and gives me a path to transfer the OS from TF to EMMC.

 

Any thoughts/advice most welcome.

 

 

[tparys]

Unfortunately, Link Star H68K is not one of the supported boards.

 

Hinlink H68K is Community Maintained and is provided as-is with no guaranteed support and no any maintainer listed.

 

If you can figure out what is different in the bootloader and device tree, you should be able to adapt what is in the Hinlink H68K build configuration.

[Marty McSly]

On 7/10/2026 at 11:04 AM, tparys said:

Unfortunately, Link Star H68K is not one of the supported boards.

 

Link Star H68K is, according to multiple sources, exactly the same as Hinlink H68K.

 

But that's not the problem (yet).

 

I'd been using an old version of RKDevTool (2.84 IIRC) which was unable to load the .img file from the Armbian site, but uninformative as to the nature of the problem.

 

Updating to RKDevTool 3.37 at least yielded an error message when attempting to load the image:

 

Quote

Note: invalid tag of firmware, please check firmware

 

Googling this suggests a corrupted download (not the problem here, the SHA sum matches) or a raw .img format rather than the packed .img format expected by RKDevTool.

 

So I compiled an image according to the Armbian Build Framework instructions. Same error message.

 

More Googling suggests that a couple of Linux CLI utilities, upgrade_tool or rkdeveloptool, may be able to flash a raw image to the board's EMMC.

 

More later...