PINE64

Hi! I hope this is the right place to ask for help. Just got my Pine's all parts necessary and tried to install this Ubuntu version on it.

First off, my SD card is a: 64GB SanDisk Extreme Pro microSDXC UHS-I Class 10
It came formatted as exfat, but my Ubuntu laptop didn't seem to like that so I had to reformat it. As FAT32 only supports up to 32GB (?) I chose to try ext4 as that seems to be a common Linux file system. To remove exfat I used this:
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=1M count=100 and it seemed to work, unplugged and plugged it in again, then ran this to make it to ext4: 
sudo mkfs.ext4 -L "microSD" /dev/sdX which worked. To move the Linux image onto there, I used the line provided in the readme file linked in the first post: 
xzcat xenial-pine64-bspkernel.xz|pv|sudo dd of=/dev/sdX bs=1M oflag=sync.

My issue now is that it won't boot, I seem to get a few error messages when I'm booting, I'll link them here:



Picture 2 is after removing and putting the microSD card back in. One thing I could detect was it saying something about my keyboard in there, not sure. If it'd matter, my keyboard is "Mad Catz cyborg v7". I also tried to boot with and without Ethernet cable, HDMI cable and USB-keyboard.

Not sure if ext4 was the right move, but I hoped so. All help I can get is appreciated.

wahlmat

The links you posted for pictures run malicious scripts. I don't know what that's about. "picture2" pops up an ad in front of the picture blocking most of it, and you can't get rid of the ad (without a trick.) "picture1" ate up 16 gigs of RAM before it locked up and crashed Firefox, when I forgot to close the tab and left it there.

Your symptoms are pretty common and there are other posts that deal with them, so it would be pointless for me to dupicate them. But the simplest problem is that people can't believe it would take that long to boot. So give it 5 minutes before you start worrying. (If you take the microSD out at any time, linux will have a fatal error and quit working and will not continue. At least it does for me. Whatever comes on the screen after removing the SD that doesn't help you find the boot problem, although you at least have a static screen to see what might have happened before.)

The next simple thing is that a weak power supply will sometimes cause a crash at a certain point in booting.

A third simple thing, which happened to me, is having multiple inputs to the monitor. Even when none of the other inputs have anything live on them, the monitor at times gets confused when the video mode changes in the boot process, and the monitor seems to think there is no video and "sleeps." Having anything live on the other inputs really confuses the monitor, and I sometimes have a hellofa time getting it to accept my manual switching to the right input. This monitor is the pickiest monitor I ever had, but it does have a beautiful 4K display.

On formatting:
The formatting is overwritten, and actually replaced with other formatting, by executing dd as in the last step you mention. So whatever you did with the microSD disk previously has no effect.

To explain: what they call formatting is just writing to the disk certain things which happen to be part of what is needed to keep track of the names and positions of files on the disk. Different "file systems" just keep track of their info in different ways. "dd" writes directly to the disk, without regard to whether what it writes may be a file or some part of a "file system." In the last step "dd" copied both the formatting info and the files exactly as it had been on some other disk.

A file system is something like the table of contents to a book. The table of contents is just text like the rest of the book, but unlike the rest of the book, it tells where to find things in the book. So if you had something which just copied all of the text, you would get both the formatting (table of contents) and the files (sections of the book.)

I am pretty sure linux will boot up with no keyboard even attached. "No keyboard" may be a problem for you, but not linux.

kflorek46 thanks for your answer!

About the images, they shouldn't do anything as it's usual photobucket links. The first one had .jpg~ogirinal in the end of the url, which might have made it weird. Also photobucket sometime uses ads, but I have now embedded the images instead. Didn't want to do that originally to take up too much space, but now I don't think anyone will have a problem with it. Sorry about that.

I think I gave it close to 3 minutes at one point to boot, but I will then try again and set my timer to 10 minutes and see.

The charger should be 5V 2A according to the specs when I bought it, so I hope that it's good. Otherwise I think you explained it really well, which I'm thankful for. If it doesn't proceed to boot after some extra minutes, I'll come back here and look at your explanation once again.

As kflorek46 pointed out, everything you do to the card before you write the image with dd is not relevant. The image replaces any file system structures you had on the card before... from the messages I see on your boot screens, it looks more like an hardware issue. Have you tried a different card?

I actually got it to work, turned out waiting 3 minutes wasn't enough. I plugged it in, went out with my dogs and when I came back in around 25 minutes later, I was prompted with a login screen. However I didn't have a keyboard available during the time so I didn't try to log in, but I got past where I though I was stuck earlier. The keyboard should be fine as I was able to get the Pine to restart when it was loading, from using keypresses.


Thanks for your help!

(08-02-2016, 10:11 AM)wahlmat Wrote: [ -> ]I actually got it to work, turned out waiting 3 minutes wasn't enough. I plugged it in, went out with my dogs and when I came back in around 25 minutes later, I was prompted with a login screen. However I didn't have a keyboard available during the time so I didn't try to log in, but I got past where I though I was stuck earlier. The keyboard should be fine as I was able to get the Pine to restart when it was loading, from using keypresses.


Thanks for your help!

Yeah I ran into the same thing yesterday! I left and came back and it booted. Seems to be a first boot thing, because after that it was fine.

A few questions;

I tried to download Chrome from the Google page and it gave me a Wrong Architecture  error


Also I'm having issues installing Kodi  I get this error 

[attachment=420]

There is no Chrome for arm64. I suggest you use Firefox. Ubuntu 16.04 now has Firefox 48 which should work just fine (as the arm64 crash was fixed). I linked the issue somewhere in the forum before - if anyone can find it feel free to link

What about for Netflix?

(08-08-2016, 01:35 PM)AUDIOTEK Wrote: [ -> ]What about for Netflix?

No clue if the Adobe DRM stuff is available for arm64 Linux and if Firefox on arm64 would download it. Anyhow even with Firefox 48 it is far from stable and you know that there is no accelerated video decoding what so ever in Firefox yes - so Netflix or any other in browser video is pretty pointless unless it has working acceleration support via cedrus.