Support ticket for 3rd party distributions

[igorpecovnik]

Armbian system config utility was designed to support Armbian users needs.

It is tied to Armbian OS, but as it was developed in universal way, many functions, especially software install part, should work on any APT based distributions.

Officially we only support problems that will manifest on Armbian OS, but if you use this application on your existing Linux distribution, comment to this ticket and report problems.

We will try to address those issues, but we strongly recommend you to install Armbian OS and use other advantages that comes as a part of Armbian OS.

Refferences:

• Armbian OS advantages
• system configurator
• software installer

[igorpecovnik]

"Manual install over Armbian" @way5 what is the reason for migration?

[way5]

The reason I'd like to stay with DietPi is that quite a few of the scripts I am using are normally live in its environment, so I didn't plan to rewrite anything hoping things would stay as is.
However if the DietPi install is not possible over Armbian, I'll do the migration.

Thanks anyways!

[igorpecovnik]

quite a few of the scripts I am using are normally live in its environment

Can you provide a list of those scripts? Adding scripts is super easy job vs. kernel maintenance what dietpi doesn't do at all.

[way5]

quite a few of the scripts I am using are normally live in its environment

Adding scripts is super easy job vs. kernel maintenance

I see.

Actually, the problem is even simpler than it seems to be at the first glance. Here is an issue report which was kindly resolved by CodeChenL: https://forum.radxa.com/t/rzero-autoboot-from-emmc/24764/2

Since Dietpi is actually based on Armbian and I also understand there is a huge amount of work in changing something which is not in project scope I was asking to keep in mind the latest patches while preparing the next Diet-build (here).

UPD:

I also must admit that the unofficial build which was shared with me by @CodeChenL works flawlessly and much smoother (in terms of setup and utilities) than the latest Armbian official distr. which is published on radxa's page.

Still guessing why no one was reporting these issues with booting. :)

[igorpecovnik]

Since Dietpi is actually based on Armbian

It can't be otherwise. The problem is their complete absence of contribution to common problems, paying common costs. In 10 years firs person made < 5, and other two not a single contribution to any open source project.

Dietpi is a lot of noise (marketing) while in reality is a spaghetti install / config script made by one person. Everything else, true value, biggest pain, comes from kernel maintainers around Armbian and other similar projects https://docs.armbian.com/#comparison

while preparing the next Diet-build

I think you already prepare more value around this hardware then they ever will. Providing right information and test. This is what we expect from maintainers for particular board to do 4 times per year.

I also must admit that the unofficial build which was shared with me by @CodeChenL works flawlessly and much smoother

Great! I hope he made a PR to the main code as this code maintainace can only be common work - we have absolutely no ways to pick and integrate solutions people made and post to forums around. Its estimated that we would need several full time developers to do that. Even this is heavily in community interest, there is nothing we can do. Also because project such as Dietpi exists. Everything we invest in common, they also get, while they invests noting.

[way5]

Alright. Thank you for the info. Now I am gonna keep up with Armbian. I have already did the checkup in the past few days for the DTSs and the pins seem to be mapped fine now. It was a pain to access hardware in previous versions so a couple of years I had kernel updates disabled.

I appreciate what you're doing guys. Hope I could help you in some ways in future.

Cheers

[CodeChenL]

Hi @igorpecovnik,
My main concern about not submitting a PR to Armbian at the moment is that these patches seem a bit hacky. However, to ensure compatibility with eMMC chips from different manufacturers (mainly Samsung), this is currently the only solution we (Radxa) have been able to find. These patches have been validated by several customers and ourselves. I'll submit a pr first, to make it easier for us to discuss how to deal with it, and to not stray from the topic of this issues.

[igorpecovnik]

My main concern about not submitting a PR to Armbian at the moment is that these patches seem a bit hacky

Understand. TBH we have several such patches in the system. More then absence of a (proper) fix is having no fix / workaround at all. In most cases the one that submitted the patch, improves this within time. Sometimes, if we really manages to push to the proper solution, patches are sent upstream (where acceptance standards are very rigid - for a reason).

I'll submit a pr first,

That is probably best. Let other people, that are close, comment / suggests changes.

[way5]

IMHO guys, this is the first really helpful fix for Radxa Zero board since "bullseye". I believe everyone would appreciate that no matter if this is "hacky" ;)

[way5]

Right after the image has been written to EMMC the kernel got started fine. However once I install the bootloader (armbian-config -> SY006) onto /dev/mmcblk1 it stops booting again. The bootloader messages are exactly the same as here