Notebook
By Igor Pečovnik / Networking • Desktop • General purpose • IOT • NAS / 0 Comments

Intel / AMD

Why Does Armbian Provide x86 Builds?

Key Benefits:

  • Delivers the embedded Linux experience and development environment to standard x86 hardware

  • Focuses on broad hardware compatibility and robust device driver support

  • Optimized for fast development cycles, automated testing, and CI/CD workflows

  • Ubuntu-based builds are free from proprietary Canonical services and telemetry

  • Offers a ready-to-use live OS image, ideal for custom Linux OS prototyping and deployment

  • Enables cross-platform development and consistency across ARM and x86 environments

By Igor Pečovnik / General purpose / 0 Comments

Khadas VIM2

Serial console:

Blue color line: Tool Pin TXD, orange color: Tool Pin RXD, black: Tool Pin GND

How to boot from SD card? After power on, quickly press the Function key 3 times in 2 seconds, then release the key. More at official manual.

khadas-vim1
By Igor Pečovnik / General purpose / 0 Comments

Khadas VIM1

To be able to boot Armbian SD card image and install Armbian to eMMC, use one of the methods to boot into upgrade mode. If you have most recent board revision (1.4 ->) then you only need to quickly press the function key (middle) 3 times in 2 seconds. Release and boot will proceed from SD card. Then use nand-sata-install utility to flash to eMMC.

Serial console:

Blue color line: Tool Pin TXD, orange color: Tool Pin RXD, black: Tool Pin GND

nanopi-r2s
By Igor Pečovnik / General purpose • Networking / 0 Comments

Nanopi R2S

  • Login console is enabled also on mUSB connector
  • Known problem: reboot sometimes doesn’t bring the device back.
  • Network devices are not managed by Network manager. Configure via /etc/network/interfaces
orangepi3
By Igor Pečovnik / General purpose / 0 Comments

Orange Pi 3

  • PCIe port is not supported: Allwinner H6 has a quirky PCIe controller that doesn’t map the PCIe address space properly to CPU, and accessing the PCIe config space, IO space or memory space will need to be wrapped. As Linux doesn’t wrap PCIe memory space access, it’s not possible to do a proper PCIe controller driver for H6. The BSP kernel modifies the driver to wrap the access, so it’s also not generic, and only devices with modified driver will work. Armbian does not support BSP based kernels. You can find more information here and here.
orangepi-rk3399
By Igor Pečovnik / NAS • Desktop • General purpose / 0 Comments

Orange Pi RK3399

  • UART has unusual speed: 1500000
  • boot from SD card is possible by shorting TP50265 to the ground and powering the board. After Armbian boots up, you can overwrite eMMC. You need to do this procedure only once or in case you totally brick your system.
  • once you have Armbian booting from eMMC, you can boot SD card in more simple manner: stop booting from UART console and execute those commands: setenv devnum 1 followed by run mmc_boot
  • you need to use EXPERT="yes" to build kernel or images.