Hi,

I have an Orange Pi 6 Plus and I am booting it from a USB stick with Armbian (Ubuntu Desktop 26.04 GNOME). After the initial setup of username/password, timezone, and locale, the last message it shows is "Now starting desktop environment". After that, nothing happens. It just sits there. (It's not a glitch as it happened twice.)

Any ideas?

Has anyone successfully booted OPi6+ from an Armbian stick/card all the way to the desktop? What media did you use? Since I get through part of the process, I supposed UEFI settings are fine (mostly factory defaults) or is there something to tweak there?

Thanks,

Petr

PS: Based on https://forum.armbian.com/topic/62058-i-am-unable-to-boot-from-any-image-on-my-orange-pis/ I will try different media (but I have previously used this one to boot Ubuntu (not Armbian) just fine; still worth trying I suppose).

8 hours ago, PetrV said:

Since I get through part of the process, I supposed UEFI settings are fine (mostly factory defaults) or is there something to tweak there?

I do not have this OP6plus, but have been looking at some similar Cix CPU based things. This thing can be treated as an x86_64 computer, so roughly 2 decades of issues with getting Linux to run on PC's should apply. Like for example endless issues with NVIDIA drivers/GPUs. 'factory defaults' is difficult to base upon as the version of the (closed-source?) factory firmware is unknown, you need to mention that in theory. But simpler things might be wrong, so it is a matter of enabling more logging, so you and forum users can see what is actually happening. I think it is not dead/frozen, just some issue with graphics subystem, can be setting, is very common problem.

I hope you have it networked, so then the lowest effort is to login via ssh with the default root:1234 as soon as possible. I did that for an old 32-bit system where I generated my own image, UEFI and GRUB based. The problem with Armbian GRUB based is that the GRUB timeout for displaying the menu is set to 0, so you see and have no easy way to interrupt boot and ad-hoc edit the boot cmdline by adding loglevel=7 for example.

Or have you seen a GRUB menu and just waited the default 5 seconds (the standard Debian that is overruled with 0 by Armbian custom GRUB script generation) ?

There plenty of ways to approach, I would edit the rootfs /boot/grub/grub.cfg in another computer, so you are not left in the dark. But I don't know how easy that is for you to do. A serial console/debug cable is the best option traditionally.