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board support - general discussion / project aims


chwe

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18 hours ago, Tido said:
23 hours ago, chwe said:

Make your list public

it is public since its first day :o  just share the link.

well.. we might have different opinions what public means.. :lol: Public accessible yes. Public means for me that the informations that such a table exists and where you find it is public.. And no, I don't share it. It's your work and your idea so it's up to you to present and explain it. :) 

 

@5kft I agree that a bunch of stuff disappears in the the black hole called forum. I assume opening issues on github might be a workflow we can deal with. GitHub issues are somehow similar to BugZilla.. If there is a known problem spotted here opening an GitHub issue with a short explanation and a link to the forum should work. But if we've another issues tool to manage.. people will boat it with issues not related to armbian (e.g. 90% of all forum threads) and then complain that we close them.. :lol: but Issues which are 'Armbian' issues should be moved/dublicated to github (mostly armbian-config, or related to 'Armbian BSP') to enhance the chance that they don't get missed. Random 3th party thingie doesn't work is not our issue and this stuff should rest here, where the community can help to fix or ignore it. 

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On 10/15/2018 at 5:46 PM, chwe said:

Maybe sufficient? maybe it needs to be more strict? Something like this pinned on every subforum once again mighthelp. 

Things to add IMO, some general forum rules to let moderators make decisions based on written rules instead of personal opinions (yes, I think we already discussed this more than a year ago):

 - primary forum language is English, messages in other languages without translation outside of "General chit chat" section may be hidden or deleted

- don't bump topics too often and don't create duplicate messages and topics to bring attention to your issue

- be respectful to each other, follow the nettiquette

- don't abuse private messaging for tech support

- don't abuse forum for self-promotion and don't spam

- breaking the rules will result in a warning, getting multiple warnings will result in a ban

 

 

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On 10/15/2018 at 6:20 PM, Tido said:

Why you would drop: Bananapi PRO  is a miracle to me.

No need to be surprised, absolutely any device can be dropped based on objective reasons, mainly lack of an interested developer or persisting HW or SW issues that we can't solve.

 

On 10/16/2018 at 3:17 PM, chwe said:

- enforce browser of choice for desktop images, Firefox and/or some lighter alternatives?

or quite the opposite - do not enforce things unless absolutely necessary, to cut support efforts on "Armbian-specific" tweaks that sometimes break. We are talking about KISS but still piling up unnecessary tweaks like DNS servers (if only there was some mechanism to automatically get a DNS server preferred by the user address among other things, I think we could even call it a "dynamic host configuration protocol")

 

On 10/16/2018 at 3:17 PM, chwe said:
  • marketing manager - to help communicate project specific services, new features, changes, ... (@igor)

or rather an "unmarketing manager" to reduce the attention to the project to help developers catch their breath

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1 minute ago, zador.blood.stained said:

No need to be surprised,

yes I am, bascially the mother of the hype about everything else but RPi (no don't tell it wasn't the first, that was RPi neither but it got the attention and this is what counts), sold thousands of time   and since Bootlin's Kickstarter better supported than ever (A20).

 

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1 minute ago, Tido said:

yes I am, bascially the mother of the hype about everything else but RPi (no don't tell it wasn't the first, that was RPi neither but it got the attention and this is what counts), sold thousands of time   and since Bootlin's Kickstarter better supported than ever (A20).

Yes, but is it still manufactured? Is it still sold worldwide? And what will you do if you are an "interested developer" and your board dies? Buy another one (if it would be even possible) or move it to "community supported"?

I'm not saying that we should drop support for this particular board right now (I'm sure that @tkaiser would have a different opinion) but any device will fade out in time, regardless of the history.

Spoiler

And speaking of history, if I remember correctly, this project (Armbian) "started" from a Cubietruck, not from a BPi or a BPro.

 

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1 hour ago, zador.blood.stained said:

Things to add IMO, some general forum rules to let moderators make decisions based on written rules instead of personal opinions (yes, I think we already discussed this more than a year ago):

 - primary forum language is English, messages in other languages without translation outside of "General chit chat" section may be hidden or deleted

- don't bump topics too often and don't create duplicate messages and topics to bring attention to your issue

- be respectful to each other, follow the nettiquette

- don't abuse private messaging for tech support

- don't abuse forum for self-promotion and don't spam

- breaking the rules will result in a warning, getting multiple warnings will result in a ban

they sound IMO better than my approach.  :thumbup:

Quote

- don't bump topics too often only bump if you update the startpost with new information and don't create duplicate messages and topics to bring attention to your issue

 

combine it maybe?

 

Quote

# Welcome to the Armbian community Forum
Cause maintenance of the community and developing Armbian to get an as much as possible reliable OS for your single board computer is often done by the same group of people we set up a few *rules* to keep community maintenance on a decent level.

 

 - primary forum language is English, messages in other languages without translation outside of "General chit chat" section may be hidden or deleted

- don't bump topics too often only bump if you update the startpost with new information and don't create duplicate messages and topics to bring attention to your issue

- be respectful to each other, follow the nettiquette

- don't abuse private messaging for tech support

- don't abuse forum for self-promotion and don't spam

- breaking the rules will result in a warning, getting multiple warnings will result in a ban

 

##TL;DR

Keep in mind, the more time we need for solving your issues, the less time we have to develop Armbian. Bring up *random feature* to Armbian later might be related to the time we need to answer questions here. The following write up should give you some insights how our Forum is organized.


## Technical support
Tech. support is splitted into SoC specific sub-forums (e.g. Allwinner A20/H2&H3, Amlogic S905 etc.). You have a hardware or kernel (e.g. missing a specific kernel module) related issue that's the place to report it. Ubuntu/Debian related questions (e.g why *random package* fails on installation) is likely not an board-specific question and should be asked Common issues. If you face any sorts of instabilities over time, please have a look in the SD card and power supply subforum of Common issues cause chances are high that your thread will also end there. Armbian is trimmed on performance, performance needs juice, not reliable PSUs and/or powering cables will avoid the juice Armbian needs to work reliable. The same counts for not reliable SD-Cards, some boards are prone to avoid working with slow cards and every board doesn't like if your SD-Card has bad sectors (getting started guide gives you a proper procedure how you check your SD-Card prior to use with Armbian). If your board isn't supported by Armbian (e.g. no Image is provided on our download page) means that your question should be asked in 'Peer to peer technical support' in the Community forums part of the Forum. We don't provide support for hardware which isn't supported by us. This counts for not supported boards and third party hardware. We simply can't test every third party hardware you probably want to use with Armbian cause we either don't own it or/and secondly don't have the time to test all the hardware people stick to their boards.
A good support question includes the following:
- Board you use
- Issue you face
- Description of your set-up (e.g. powering, connected hardware, used SD-Card)
- 'sudo armbianmonitor -u' - this gives us some needed logs which makes debugging a way easier!
We aren't 'SBC Whisperers' or mind-readers we need logs to work with, that's why 'armbianmonitor -u' was developed. If your board refuses to boot with a freshly prepared Image from our download page, please read again 'SD card and power supply' chances are high that this is a related to SD card and or insufficient powering! If your board refuses to boot after upgrade, try to provide at least a bootlog from serial console. USB-UART bridges aren't that pricey and worth every cent when you work with SBCs. 
Lastly, most of us aren't native English and it's not an issue if your language isn't polished. As long as you try to describe your system and your problem best, it doesn't matter if there are some small errors in wording. 
Further, we have docs.armbian.com mostly written by developers for users. A bunch of questions can be answered by reading the docs and or using the search-engine first. 


## Community forums
*P2P tech support* is mainly for boards where we didn't provide official support. E.g. boards marked as .csc/.eol in Armbians boardconfig. Those board get not the same amount of support cause they are .csc or .eol for a reason (e.g. nobody is interested in maintaining and testing them or we don't have enough samples to test them). There's a Reviews subforum where people with a good background review SBCs critically and Research guides & tutorials section. You built a fancy project on top of Armbian? We happily read your story how you get it working! From users by users, people might ask you how you solved parts or how you can enhance your project.


*TV boxes*: we don't provide official Armbian support for most TV boxes. But we offer a buildscript which makes it possible to build images for TV boxes and we provide a subforum where people interested in Linux on TV boxes can dicuss the issues they face.


*General chit chat*: Armbians water-cooler to discuss rumors towards shiny new toys and/or not Armbian related stuff - not always 100% serious here.


## Development
A section mostly for more experienced users, for example for SoCs where Armbian support is currently not mature enough for full support, questions related to the build framework and 'Board Bring Up' for new boards we might consider supporting in the future. We can't provide the same level of support for WIP (work in process) SoCs cause kernels for those boards are simply not ready yet. Board Bring Up is mostly for experienced users which want to contribute in support for new boards/SoCs, a *please support random board* without any rational and no interest in contribution for such a support will simply be ignored. If you just want to point us to a new interesting board our watercooler (General chit chat) is the right place for it.

 

your part for 'rules' and my part to a bit explain how the forum is organized (or only yours I'm fine with both).  

 

1 hour ago, zador.blood.stained said:

or quite the opposite - do not enforce things unless absolutely necessary, to cut support efforts on "Armbian-specific" tweaks that sometimes break.

can we pack such tweaks (e.g. browser tweaks) in deb packages? and let it up to the community, interested developers if they want to maintain such a package? Maybe they should be in a community repo similar to: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/official_repositories#community

and the user has to actively bind in 'community'  to get such tweaked packages installed? This would avoid conflicts between 'being as pure as possible' and 'best performing OS you can find'. 

1 hour ago, zador.blood.stained said:

And what will you do if you are an "interested developer" and your board dies? Buy another one (if it would be even possible) or move it to "community supported"?

IMO csc. and patches from csc boards which fail get moved to a sub-folder so that they no longer get applied to our kernels. From here it's up to the community to fix those patches. As long as the maintainers fix those patches anyway, there's not much an 'need' to contribute until the whole project crashes.. Phase them out.. and the community has to bring them back. :) 

Somewhere under the dust there should be a BPi or a BPi PRO (not sure anymore which one it is), my interest to keep it working is rather low.

2 hours ago, zador.blood.stained said:

Yes, but is it still manufactured? Is it still sold worldwide?

http://www.lenovator.com has 8 in stock (59$)

https://www.reichelt.com/ claims stock (~40$)

https://www.robotshop.com/ claims stock (59$)

and conrad.de/ch shows sinovoips logo (I know they had some beef who owns the trademark).. :lol:

 

2 hours ago, zador.blood.stained said:

I'm sure that @tkaiser would have a different opinion

that's why I think we should 'spread the word' to make it public as much as we can before the board get's dropped. So that 'nobody' can miss it. If you realize that the board was dropped after it's done you might be pissed (and I can somehow understand it). If you maintain x BPi Pros for one of your projects/company you might be interested that this board may be still supported but then you've to help once 'the maintainers' decide/plan it's not worth anymore. Spread it on forum, twitter, google+ (before google+ goes down :lol:), fb etc. so that people realize it prior to break due to dropped months ago... 

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A few things was already solved and a few things can be pushed forward:  release naming 2018.10 is ready for last inspection: https://github.com/armbian/build/pull/1129/files What was done: u-boot package gets frozen by default (armbian-config need adjustment after that to handle »update u-boot«). Bootscripts and their handling were moved to u-boot package. MOTD will look like this:

Before:

Spoiler

 _   _                         _   __  __ _  _   
| \ | | __ _ _ __   ___  _ __ (_) |  \/  | || |  
|  \| |/ _` | '_ \ / _ \| '_ \| | | |\/| | || |_ 
| |\  | (_| | | | | (_) | |_) | | | |  | |__   _|
|_| \_|\__,_|_| |_|\___/| .__/|_| |_|  |_|  |_|  
                        |_|                      
Welcome to Armbian - Xenial (2018.10) Linux 4.4.161-rk3399

 

Version number 2018.10 is shown only when stable image was update with official update else commit is shown and such image doesn’t receive official support. Other concerns, which were expressed in that PR (and are off topic) such as package rebuild policy shall be done separately. It also look a bit complicated.


Adjusted to:


 _   _                         _   __  __ _  _   
| \ | | __ _ _ __   ___  _ __ (_) |  \/  | || |  
|  \| |/ _` | '_ \ / _ \| '_ \| | | |\/| | || |_ 
| |\  | (_| | | | | (_) | |_) | | | |  | |__   _|
|_| \_|\__,_|_| |_|\___/| .__/|_| |_|  |_|  |_|  
                        |_|                      
Welcome to Ubuntu Xenial with Armbian Linux 4.4.161-rk3399



Where are no concerns for moving to CSC/drop:

 

Kernels:

- cubox 3.14.y and Udoo,

- meson 3.10.y default,

- sP6818-default 4.4.y,

- odroid-c2 3.1x kernel

 

Boards to CSC, build script and download page:
Olimex Lime2 NAND

Olimex Micro

Orangepi Pi2

Orangepi+

Nanopi M1

MiQi

NanopiM1+

Odroid C1
 

General concerns which we can also carry on concern free: 


- project is operating on too big scale -> focus back on the essentials.

- reduce attention to the project to reduce pressure on the development.

- rethink if we need to implement some sort of project management/ticketing system.

- where and how to move things that important but get lost on the forum

- fine tune recently created documents: forum rules, guidelines and Contribute. 

- add moderator duties short list to the forum rules and refresh moderator crew.

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On 10/17/2018 at 6:32 PM, zador.blood.stained said:

or rather an "unmarketing manager" to reduce the attention to the project to help developers catch their breath


Proper communication can help that. If there is none, it's hard to change things. Communicate services as such: search function, documentation, ...  Most of marketing is done by the happy users which means we have very little to do with this.
 

On 10/17/2018 at 9:06 PM, chwe said:

that's why I think we should 'spread the word' to make it public as much as we can before the board get's dropped. So that 'nobody' can miss it.


Why should we care about? It is our time which is getting wasted on support. When we decide it's time to go, we drop the board and voila.

My proposition is to write a clear conditions under which a board can come back. To the community supported configuration. This means we will update images, but that's all what can be done.

 

 

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2 hours ago, Igor said:

- odroid-c2 3.1x kernel

@TonyMac32 and I worked on a odroid2meson (on my fork) branch to merge those families and drop odroid c2 3.1x kernel, unfortunately we both haven't a odroid to test it.. ;) I would prefer a 'before drop' release tag.

 

2 hours ago, Igor said:

Why should we care about? It is our time which is getting wasted on support. When we decide it's time to go, we drop the board and voila.

the idea is, if somebody wants a board kept alive he can drop in before all the patches related to a board are outdated ('forced' contribution). Cause IMO board-related patches (for eol, csc) which fail should be sorted out in a 'cold folder' (so that the information doesn't get lost, but it reduces also the amount of patches we have to maintain)

 

2 hours ago, Igor said:

Other concerns, which were expressed in that PR (and are off topic) such as package rebuild policy shall be done separately. It also look a bit complicated.

off topic yes, but not unimportant IMO. :) 

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18 hours ago, Igor said:

 

Hey @igor

 

I've polished the terms.. I will update this post with privacy and guideline tweaks here if I write any.  Feel free to change or use the parts you like

 

* The official forum language is English.  Messages in other languages are only permitted in "General chit chat" section.   Non-english posts in other sectiions may be hidden or deleted.  Please use a translation tool if necessary.
* Do not bump topics or create duplicate messages for the purpose of brinigng attention to your issue.   If bumping an old topic to resume conversation or provide new information, update the beginning post if possible.
* Always be respectful to each other.  Be a good community member and practice propper netiquette.
* Do not abuse private messaging for tech support.   Support issues should be discussed on the forum to benefit the community.
* Do not abuse the forum for marketing or self-promotion.
* No spam.
* Breaking the rules will result in a warning.  Multiple warnings will result in a ban.

 

 

 

Edited by lanefu
moved content from gist to post itself
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7 hours ago, chwe said:

and I worked on a odroid2meson (on my fork) branch to merge those families and drop odroid c2 3.1x kernel, unfortunately we both haven't a odroid to test it.. ;) I would prefer a 'before drop' release tag.


Probably best is to reach out to community for help in such cases. Pinned topic with a very brief description why and what kind of help is needed. If there is nobody in a week ... we tried.

 

7 hours ago, chwe said:

the idea is, if somebody wants a board kept alive he can drop in before all the patches related to a board are outdated 

 

Dropping a board is not a critical task. It's just a name and status change while dropping sources and patches is a bit more complicated and we could actually leave them for a while with additional pop-up inside build script "scheduled for removal" where its noted what will happen and how to prevent that?

 

7 hours ago, chwe said:

off topic yes, but not unimportant IMO.


Important, but need some study and can be done later. In a separate PR.

 

5 hours ago, lanefu said:

I've polished the terms.


Thank you. Applied.

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Forum added, descriptions adjusted. If there are some concerns, please speak up now.

 

Next, moderator duties which shell be added to https://forum.armbian.com/terms
 

Spoiler

 

What kind of forum moderation is enforced?


- move, split and merge (off)topics,
- keep topics clean by adding spoilers for long text, code and pictures,

- warn users on abusive behaviour,

- moderators complies with the same general rules as everyone else,

 


Rules and refreshed moderators should keep forum in a little better shape. Today it is very simple to find a topic or post in the wrong place.

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On 10/21/2018 at 2:59 PM, Igor said:

Rules and refreshed moderators should keep forum in a little better shape. Today it is very simple to find a topic or post in the wrong place.

hehe had to accept that I can be fired from my mod duties today.. :lol:

 

btw.

how should we deal with:

 

IMO I'm not a big fan of selling over forum.. In case somebody gets fooled they blame our forum for it. Same counts somehow for ebay links (at least, there's ebay 'in charge').

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Coming back from illness that I have tackled for past three months, I see that you have dropped support for Orange Pi+ boards. Well this just fits how things have gone for me lately... Anyway, I am not here to rant about your decision on the subject, or my life, but I do have few questions.

 

What does this mean for me exactly? I have been using Armbian on my Orange pi+ to run Octoprint and my intentions were to make and maintain OctoPi-like image for Orange Pi+ and maybe for some other Orange boards as well, if I find someone interested with some other similar hardware to test etc. I was days away for releasing my first image, when life got on the way. I also had other projects planned, but I was waiting the HW acceleration support to merge on the Armbian to utilize in these projects.

 

Should I still go ahead with this or am I out of luck? Can I still compile Armbian for my board in the future even though it's EOS? What would it require getting Orange Pi+ back to supported boards?

I am fine compiling my own images from source and I have been doing so, but fiddling too much with the source files, device trees etc. are still beyond me. I am eager to learn, but I have not found a good source for information nor platform/community where to ask questions. Using just google is kind of slow and somewhat frustrating.

 

I am not at all eager to just trash these boards and spend money on new ones just because of this. These boards suite my needs hardware wise so, I find it very hard to justify buying something else just because you have decided to drop the software support for them. I am saying this just to emphasize that I don't want to buy new boards, not so much to criticize your decisions, even though I may not agree with them.

 

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2 hours ago, mdm63 said:

spend money on new ones just because of this.


Start spending on Armbian https://www.armbian.com/donate or become a part https://www.armbian.com/get-involved/ and you can hope to get (better) support. Ranting or pleading is pointless. "you" currently cover 15 min of support per month, which is,  for example, the time needed to reply on this post. A few % of the time is covered by industry, while the rest goes from our pockets. Until the relation is this extreme, there is nothing we can do about.

 

Costs have to be maintained at the sustainable level - we already provide more than possible which is reflected in deteriorated mental health - stress. Probably reinforcement with a group of volunteers (welcome to join) or a few professionals (which you need to pay for) would help to relieve us from stress.

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On 10/17/2018 at 7:32 PM, zador.blood.stained said:

No need to be surprised, absolutely any device can be dropped based on objective reasons, mainly lack of an interested developer or persisting HW or SW issues that we can't solve.

short question - why only the BPi Pro and not the normal BPi? The Pro version only has additionally WiFi from my sight. CPU / Ram is the same.
What did I miss?

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2 minutes ago, guidol said:

short question - why only the BPi Pro and not the normal BPi? The Pro version only has additionally WiFi from my sight. CPU / Ram is the same.
What did I miss?


If one Banana must go, "complex" one goes first. IIRC there are issues with wifi in 4.19.y ... the rest is simple and must work.  We can easily add a normal BPi there as well :) 

 

 

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14 minutes ago, Igor said:

If one Banana must go, "complex" one goes first. IIRC there are issues with wifi in 4.19.y ... the rest is simple and must work.  We can easily add a normal BPi there as well :) 

Why not tell users that it will be  a "combinded" image for the normal/PRO BPi, but because of the WiFi-Problem in 4.19.y there is support for the onboard WiFi of the Pro. They could use a USB-WiFi or ethernet?

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40 minutes ago, guidol said:

tell users


Central part of support is communicating with users. That's why EOS/CSC exists. It's the area where nobody(or 3rd party in case of CSC) cares what's happening and this area can only continue to expand. Sometimes solutions are simple, sometimes complex, but somebody needs to pay attention, fix and comm with people. That today represent a not so small expense.
 

I am currently spending hours for dealing with clients, "clients", friends, "friends" and users. It is communicating which nobody pays for. I can blow few hours, but not entire day(s).

Edited by Igor
clarifying CSC
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21 hours ago, Igor said:


Start spending on Armbian https://www.armbian.com/donate or become a part https://www.armbian.com/get-involved/ and you can hope to get (better) support. Ranting or pleading is pointless. "you" currently cover 15 min of support per month, which is,  for example, the time needed to reply on this post. A few % of the time is covered by industry, while the rest goes from our pockets. Until the relation is this extreme, there is nothing we can do about.

 

Costs have to be maintained at the sustainable level - we already provide more than possible which is reflected in deteriorated mental health - stress. Probably reinforcement with a group of volunteers (welcome to join) or a few professionals (which you need to pay for) would help to relieve us from stress.

I don't understand how you got a rant or pleading out of my post? Having a bad day?

Did you know that supporting and contributing would be much more appealing if asking couple of simple questions and voicing ones interest to contribute was not pissed on...

I hope you have better new year.

 

Edit: Actually I tough that making interesting projects using Armbian, that have potential to attract new users (<-potential donator's/new contributors), would be considered contributing. Well, I guess I was wrong. Also, FYI not all of us are made out of money. Some of us actually struggle to get the ends meat, so we have to think other ways to support. If I had the money, I would be more than happy to donate lavishly. When there is more motivation than knowledge, it's better ask questions than just mess about and the best way to kill that motivation is to be a jerk.

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5 hours ago, mdm63 said:

I don't understand


You see only hardware costs and rant about support. We didn't sell you any HW and you don't pay for any services, "Hello Armbian" makes a debt. A small one, but when you multiply this by 1.000, 5.000 or 10.000 we come to a WTF number. Sometimes people's wishes represent a projects worth tens or hundred thousands of euros. They have no clue and they truly expect that "team armbian" will sort that out. For free. And we have to ground them, we have to kill their insane wishes / motivation since there is no other way. This is happening over and over. No need to have a bad day.


If your contribution is positive, you cover your debt. If you rant, spam or want something, you are adding. This is how economical relations are made. They drive our world around. It sounds crazy but this its the truth: my job is to limit your spending on support since you are using our credit card.

 

5 hours ago, mdm63 said:

Some of us actually struggle


I do understand that. Many people do struggle. Perhaps our project also struggle? It creates roughly 10-20-50x more debt than we have income. The difference is covered with free work and private money earned elsewhere. How long we will be able to survive under such conditions?

 

On 12/31/2018 at 7:35 AM, mdm63 said:

not so much to criticize your decisions


Dropping support is not popular decision - I know - but is related with lack of resources. Contributors on the other hand are happy with such decisions and their ranting "we support way too many boards" is for me more important than what users want.


I only pointed you to the direction how you can change this - either by you dealing with this board or by contribution funds. 3rd options is that we forget talking about this ...

Happy new year!

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On 12/31/2018 at 7:35 AM, mdm63 said:

Anyway, I am not here to rant about your decision on the subject, or my life, but I do have few questions.

That is kind of a rant.

Know that without Armbian your OPi+ was as good as useless all this time.
Do you know how many boards Orange Pi makes? They don`t know themself I guess. It is impossible to support all of them, and keep supporting them. I can`t even find info about a OPi + on the OPi website. I see a one +, +2, pc+, win+,..
https://wikidevi.com/w/index.php?title=Orange_Pi_Plus&amp;action=edit&amp;redlink=1
 

And you want Armbian to support it while the maker doesn`t? You can still use your device without needing to pay anything.

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22 minutes ago, NicoD said:

That is kind of a rant.

Know that without Armbian your OPi+ was as good as useless all this time.
Do you know how many boards Orange Pi makes? They don`t know themself I guess. It is impossible to support all of them, and keep supporting them. I can`t even find info about a OPi + on the OPi website. I see a one +, +2, pc+, win+,..
https://wikidevi.com/w/index.php?title=Orange_Pi_Plus&amp;action=edit&amp;redlink=1
 

And you want Armbian to support it while the maker doesn`t? You can still use your device without needing to pay anything.

Have to agree. OrangePi ship out their boards with Android images. Their Linux images hosted in their website no longer could detect their own boards emmc. I tried asking OrangePi for help but they could only provide support for what Android images that comes with the board.

 

Armbian supporting any Arm boards out there is a god send.

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9 hours ago, mdm63 said:

Edit: Actually I tough that making interesting projects using Armbian, that have potential to attract new users (<-potential donator's/new contributors), would be considered contributing. Well, I guess I was wrong. Also, FYI not all of us are made out of money. Some of us actually struggle to get the ends meat, so we have to think other ways to support. If I had the money, I would be more than happy to donate lavishly. When there is more motivation than knowledge, it's better ask questions than just mess about and the best way to kill that motivation is to be a jerk.

 

for the first part.. it can give us interesting new users or just more questions in the support forum which takes even more time.. who knows. ;) For the second, as someone currently finishing his studies I know this situation quite well. You can also donate your time. :) e.g. helping with support and maintaining one of the many boards we support.

The orange pi plus is not sold anymore, probably only a few maintainer have this board and even testing was never done since it's available: https://github.com/armbian/testings

To keep the project alive we have to reduce the numbers of boards we support. The last months showed that it isn't possible to properly support all those boards with the few maintainers we have.

 

10 hours ago, mdm63 said:

Did you know that supporting and contributing would be much more appealing if asking couple of simple questions and voicing ones interest to contribute was not pissed on...

And that will happen even more often as long as the maintainers are under constant stress. Normally people here show only up if something doesn't work. It's not that they show up with solutions. Maybe this thread would get a complete different spin if you would start with something like "what is needed to bring this board back to full support?"

Since the SoC is still supported there won't be that much efforts to keep it alive (doesn't mean that we will do it, but it might be an opportunity for someone who wants to step in). With a EOS we just make it clear that this board won't be supported in the future from the current maintainers.

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On 12/31/2018 at 4:12 AM, Igor said:


Start spending on Armbian https://www.armbian.com/donate 


Quick suggestion --- also add donate link  in plain site at top of forum....    

I was further along in the thread, and I impulsively decided to donate, and so I scrolled to top of forum and no link so i had to work for it ;P

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26 minutes ago, lanefu said:

Quick suggestion --- also add donate link  in plain site at top of forum....    

And also Terms of Use / Community guidelines should be linked somewhere in plain sight. Right now it can be accessed when registering, and even there it is not clearly shown as a link. IMO it should be on the top menu row as it is more important than i.e. Privacy policy that exists mostly for legal reasons.

 

Edit: It's also on the bottom bar, but it will be hidden after you click "Accept", looks like by a specific cookie.

 

Edit 2: Now that I'm looking at those (Registration Terms specifically) - they should be a numbered list instead of a bullet list, and we should probably add a new rule "Try to stay on topic defined by the starting post or developer posts in the thread. Off-topic posts that derail the discussion may be hidden, moved or deleted."

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