The challenge before me is to bring up a mainline Debian install on the RockPro64. It will be a headless server with at least one SATA disk. I know there will be snags, but I'm hoping to work through them and maybe turn to you folks for help. I'll document what I discover along the way so others can use this as a guide.

Problem 1: (deferred) NAS case defects.

The first unit I received was warped or otherwise misshapen. (Maybe damaged in shipping?) The board's screw holes did not quite align with the case's standoffs, and the ports did not quite align with the case holes, so I could not mount the board.

The second unit I received has other problems, but at least the mounting holes are properly aligned, so I can move forward with the project. I will revisit the remaining case defects later.

Problem 2: (solved) Debian installer image.

The netboot installer daily build has been failing for the past week, so the link to the latest installer is (at the time of this writing) broken.

I browsed for earlier builds and used the last one that succeeded. Following the readme in that directory, I decompressed and concatenated the rockpro64 part with the generic part to form a complete SD card image, and wrote it to a microsd card using dd. This allowed me to proceed, but only briefly, as a related problem came up later. (See problem 4.)

Solution:  It turns out the installer daily builds stop working whenever the Debian archive's kernel is upgraded, because the kernel module ABI no longer matches the version used by the installer. Submit a report to the debian-installer maintainers and/or contact them on irc to see if someone has time to update the installer, and then wait for a new daily build.

Problem 3: (workaround exists) Serial console.

Connecting my USB-to-TTL UART/serial adapter to pins 6, 8, and 10 of the rockpro64 (described here) established communication, but the serial line settings were wrong. At 115200 bps, booting yielded a little garbage, then several lines of readable text, then a lot more garbage. At 1500000 bps, only garbage was received for the entire boot sequence.

I found this report that the boot firmware runs the console at 115200 while the Debian installer runs at 1500000, which was helpful information, but it didn't explain why 1500000 bps didn't work at all.

It turns out the 1.5 Mbps speed is too fast for the CP2102 chip that is used on many USB-to-serial adapters, including mine. (My adapter was advertised as supporting that speed, but I suppose that was false advertising.)

Workaround: Reconfigure the installer. I mounted the SD card on my computer, opened the extlinux/extlinux.conf file in a text editor, and added this text on its own line at the end of the default boot stanza (the section that starts with "label l0"): 

• Tell the installer to create the /boot partition on the same SD card that contains the installer image. This becomes partition 2 on that card.
  
• Set the bootable flag on partition 2.
  
• After installing, create the boot/dtbs/rockchip directory on partition 2.
  
• Copy boot/dtbs/rockchip/rk3399-rockpro64-v2.dtb from partition 1 (the installer partition) to the same directory on partition 2.
  
• Create the /extlinux directory on partition 2.
  
• Create an extlinux/extlinux.conf file in that directory on parition 2, with this content: (The value after root= must match what the installer says in its "You will need to boot manually" message.)
  

• Mount the installer SD card on a computer, and create a file called preseed.cfg in the root directory, containing this text:
  

• Tell the installer about the preseed configuration by appending preseed/file=/media/preseed.cfg to the  kernel command line. Together with the argument we added earlier for the serial console speed, the append line should look like this:
  

• Boot from the installer SD card and proceed through the installation process, but stop at the "Finish the installation" screen. Do not press the <Continue> button yet.
  
• Switch away from the installer's virtual screen to a terminal screen, by pressing Control+A and then 2.
  
• Start a shell in the newly installed filesystem (which is already mounted at /target) by running these commands:
  

• Add these lines to the end of /etc/apt/sources.list:
  

• Create a file called /etc/apt/preferences.d/unstable-rockpro64.pref containing this text:
  

• Upgrade the newly installed system's kernel packages to the latest available from the unstable suite, using these commands:
  

• Exit the installed filesystem environment:
  

• Return to the installer's virtual screen, by pressing Control+A and then 1.
  
• Finally, press the <Continue> button on the "Finish the installation" screen.
  

I have about 6 wifi Access Points that all use the same ESSID.

Even when sitting in the same place, the pinephone running mobian current as of today, will randomly popup the password dialog for the wifi password.

Most of the time it will not successfully reconnect and will ask for the password 3 or 4 times until it apparently gives up or I give up.

Turning the wifi adapter off and back on quickly generally does not help.

Turning the wifi adapter off for about 15 seconds and turning it back on does tend to produce a working wifi session.

The behavior happens every few hours.

Any reason the wifi can't remember the password itself?  And perhaps retry / off-on cycle the wifi on its own?

The Access Point I would think it would be using is an ASUS RAX75.  (nighthawk).

Sorry, I accidentally deleted the content of my prior post, because I did not understand how the reply editor worked.
So I deleted the entire post as what was left was not helpful.  (Was there a way to go back to prior versions?)

So here is synopsis without all the nice details I had in the prior post.

I was doing a fresh install of Mobian to the EMMC.
I did an apt update and apt upgrade

and it got stuck at 7% for 20 hours.  Reading elsewhere I found people running into a similar issue and identify a system control restart command related to fstrim as the problem.  I killed the systemctl restart process related to fstrim

The process continued a little bit and exited.

I did another

apt upgrade

It got to 88% and got stuck again.

I killed another systemctl restart process this time related to something else.

This time the apt upgrade continued to completion.

I re-ran
apt upgrade
and
dpkg --configure -a

just to make sure everything was okay, and everything was okay.

I think in both hang cases there was also a process related to something about dialog.

Perhaps the upgrade was asking something that did not appear on the screen?

I ran the entire process once on the phone via Kings Cross and once via SSH using a screen session.

I saw:
https://github.com/dreemurrs-embedded/Jumpdrive

Ok, it looks like you can flash jumpdrive into a microSD and boot the phone. Does it also say this is a tool collection?

Then I read people use USB to boot with jumpdrive without using a microSD card?

Is this like a small OS just to fix things?

Can anyone with patience, explain a little bit? Not too technical, please

thanks

Hey!

My Pinephone BH won't boot anymore. I have PM Os installed on the emmc, the sd card as an additional drive. It worked very well with the stable branch. Three days later it was dead. When pressing the power button it stucks with the 'led test' and makes a short 'click' (which seems to be specific to pm os) and restarts over and over again. that it quits at the "led test" reminds on the error bieps from bios, when something essential did go wrong. So: no boot screen, nothing.

What I already tried:
- completely charge the battery
- flash the sd card with jumpdrive:
The phone booted into the jumpdrive modus, but: lsblk did not show the emmc nor the sd card (which is strange). I can unplug the usb cable while it runs jumpdrive, so the battery works well.

I think the emmc is dead. Can I replace it??

I appreciate any idea.


Ralf

The PinePhone touch screen controller GT917S datasheet contains a lot of useful-looking information, but (of course) it says nothing about the API(s) that can be used to access the controller. I'm interested in supporting braille input on a PinePhone, probably on Mobian and/or pmOS. Can anyone point me to some relevant resources?

The PinePhone touch screen controller GT917S datasheet contains a lot of useful-looking information, but (of course) it says nothing about the API(s) that can be used to access the controller. I'm interested in supporting braille input on a PinePhone, probably on Mobian and/or pmOS. Can anyone point me to some relevant resources?

Hi there - I'm hoping someone can help me figure out how to fix my Mobian installation. I've got it installed on the eMMC, with a 128Gb SD card for storage of music and such, and it's been working great since I got the phone several weeks ago. Today I did a couple of apt update & upgrades. On the second update it told me that u-boot-sunxi and u-boot-tools were among the packages to be updated. I ran sudo apt upgrade as usual to upgrade the other packages in the list, but then following the directions on the Mobian wiki Tweaks page I also ran

Does anyone have a link to the PinePhone CAD models? I might have a design improvement or two that I would like to implement using CAD and either make a custom part or contribute them directly to the Pine64 PinePhone project. If someone would care to share them I would appreciate it, thank you.

Im running into an issue where i added a 128gb EMMC to my clusterboard and now my nodes wont boot.

removing the emmc makes no change and only having one in doesnt matter either, they boot in the baseboard.

is there a way to plug something into the USB port on the cluster board to find out what its complaining about? 

any help would be much appreciated.