Minimal community edition of Armbian to run a minimal OS, podman and OpenClaw

(Just wanted to share my recent success)



Downloaded community rolling release minimal Arabian image from:

https://www.armbian.com/rock64/

Etchered onto 4Gb SD-Card.



Booted, user:root pass:1234

Added ssh key, disable root password.

Ran the armbian-update



$> sudo apt-get install f2fs-tools

$> armbian-config (transfer os to internal emmc 

(this worked like a charm, uses f2fs and leave /boot as ext)



$>  sudo apt-get install git

$>  sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https



Using podman required the following dependencies:

$> apt install uidmap

$> apt install nftables

$> apt install catatonit

$> apt install passt

$> apt install podman

$> apt install podman-compose



$> git clone --depth 10 https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw



$> # tmp isn’t big enough for the next steps

$> mount -o remount,size=2600M /tmp



$> cd openclaw

$> ./setup-podman.sh --quadlet

$> sudo systemctl --machine openclaw@ --user start openclaw.service

However, I struggled to access logs of what was going on inside podman.

Plan B mise-en-place managed tools

Install mise-en-place using apt
from: https://mise.jdx.dev/installing-mise.html

Hello ,

hjae installed Devuan 5/6 on a newly acquired RockPro64 -
very pleased overall with the system

https://devuan.bio.lmu.de/devuan/dists/d...rd-images/
https://devuan.bio.lmu.de/devuan/dists/e...ard-images

however iam missing out on resolutions,
since xrandr is reporting only resolutions on 16:9 format, however my monitor are mostly in 16:10;

do i need additional driver or firmware?

devuan is a derivative of debian, so devuan 5 iscorresponding to debian 12
devuan 6 to debian 13 trixie roughly.



thank you very much.

Hello all. I'm thinking about following option:

connect one 2.5" HDD to a USB3.0 port and second HDD to a USB-C port. Can be both powered on simultaneoulsy only from USB?
If I transfer data from one disk to another will the data transfer be too slow because both disk are on the same USB3 controller?

What if I connect the second disk to a USB2 port?

Only one disk will be working 24/7. The other one will only be turned on for weekly backups.

I'm looking to add my pine64 to a din rail and am wondering what the dimensions are for the mounting holes and a) does a horizontal din mount exist and b) are the mount holes the same dimensions as any 3d printer boards.

Debian Mobian
vmlinuz-6.1-sunxi64

Docking bar doesn't work w/ the fon in the keyboard (connected to the pinefon
USB-C port).  The keyboard manual says (in four languages)...

  When coupled w/ the keyboard the pinefone's USB-C is to be used 'solely' for
  data and peripherials.

I take the docking bar to be a peripherial.  I've read through the relevant
material w/o finding a way through.

  Firmware:  https://xnux.eu/pinephone-keyboard/
  Firmware repository: https://xff.cz/git/pinephone-keyboard/
  FAQ:  https://xnux.eu/pinephone-keyboard/faq.html

Would like to hear from anyone who has this working.

-ludy-

Using PineTab2 is great. On Gnome everything feels snappy enough. Only using a full scale browser like Brave needs way too much resources. It is very slow and some sites do not work at all.

Anyway waypipe solved that for me by being able to stream Brave from my main powerful computer. Having installed waypipe on both client and server using just this.

I have an SD Card extender for booting my under-development OS.  But I'm tired of switching it in/out for each build every few minutes.  So I had the idea to just transmit my builds over the UART interface!

The UART seems to default to 115,200 (from u-boot?) and is working fine with my serial USB adapter.  However this baud rate is going to be too slow for my 10MB debug builds.

So I wanted to try 1.5Mbps with the UART divisor of 0x1, but it doesnt seem to work (using linux util 'screen' but also tried my own Zig UART code).

My question is, how do I set the APB2 clock dividers and UART0 divider to match any of the standard baud rates please? and is there a limit on UART0?  I seem to recall a limit elsewhere related to the modem, but I cant find the details now.

Also, from what I brute forced so far, it seems like I can only approximate other baud settings?  In fact the default UART divider of 0xd seems to also be an approximation?  Is that the best I can do here?

Alternative would be to get the USB port working, but I think that might be quite a bit more challenging...

Just got my first Pinetab- thrilled with the quality!!

But...I can't seem to get  updates to install- have searched the web for solutions including "sudo pacman -Syu" and related variations, but no matter what  do I keep getting the following error:

"Dependency resolution failed:

libavcodec.so (followed by string of info)
libswrsample.so (followed by string of info)
libicuuc,so (followed by string of info)


Not being a dev I'm stuck at how to correct this issue- does anyone know of a solution?

Thanks!

TL;DR:
A small, audio-first handheld released as an open dev platform, derived from PinePhone hardware, designed to be capable of a Rockbox port. Physical controls, great battery life, optional PineBuds + external display support. I would buy one immediately and actively work on the Rockbox port — I’ve been wanting an open hardware Rockbox target like this for a long time.
I wanted to float an idea that feels very aligned with Pine64’s strengths: reuse existing work, document it well, and let the community do interesting things with it.

Concept:
A single-purpose handheld primarily intended as a media player, but released explicitly as an open development platform, not a polished consumer product.

Think: “PinePhone without the phone.”

High-level hardware direction:

• Start from the PinePhone hardware lineage (SoC, audio path, power, USB-C)
  
• Remove phone-specific components (modem, cameras, etc.)
  
• Reduce overall size
  
• Add a small, low-power screen
  
• Physical controls (rocker / select / hold)
  
• Headphone jack, microSD
  
• Focus on battery life
  

• Rockbox already solves the hard problems for this class of device (audio quality, codecs, physical controls, power efficiency).
  
• Pine64 already excels at open ARM hardware where the value is documentation, reuse, and community ports
  
• There’s growing interest in calm, offline, single-purpose devices (especially for music) that don’t try to compete with phones.
  

• PineBuds support for local playback and experimentation
  
• Modest mic + compute for on-device translation / transcription experiments (not positioned as an “AI gadget”)
  
• Optional external display support over USB-C for docking or experimentation, while remaining clearly a handheld media player first
  

I'm using the pine a64 with 512mb of ram. i used like 5 different operating systems and all of them couldn't detect my Ethernet connection. what could be detected was a USB Ethernet dongle, however none of the operating systems had drivers for it. I'm pretty sure there's something broken on the board and wanted advice on confirming that and what to do next. thank you