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+--- Thread: Star64: All listed distros don't boot (/showthread.php?tid=20267)
Star64: All listed distros don't boot - tantamount - 05-08-2026
Here an overview of what Star64 distros work or don't.
TL;DR: None listed in the wiki boot
Irradium 3.8, kernel 6.12:
Doesn't boot. The power light stays green forever, no HDMI signal.
Irradium 3.8, kernel 7.0:
Doesn't boot. The power light stays green forever, no HDMI signal.
DietPi Trixie:
Doesn't boot. The power light stays green forever, no HDMI signal.
Armbian:
They dropped the Star64 some time ago.
NixOS v2023.11.26:
This one doesn't decompress: "unexpected end of file"
NixOS 23.11.20230827:
Doesn't boot. The power light stays green forever, no HDMI signal.
NuttX RTOS:
Doesn't boot. The power light stays green forever, no HDMI signal.
What does boot:
1. I still have an ancient copy of Armbian from when it did support the Star64, which does boot (non-graphical).
2. I see that Fishwaldo's old images from 2023 are still available here: https://pine64.my-ho.st:8443/
Thus I think the "Software releases" section should be updated to remove the entries for the distros that don't even boot.
Of Fishwaldo's 3 images (version 2.1), I get the following results:
- The minimal distro does not boot. I get the green light that never blinks blue. This is a pity because text-only could be useful.
- The Weston distro boots and provides a fast GUI, however it doesn't provide anything else, like a menu or a way to launch apps or settings.
- The Plasma distro boots and provides a fast but more laggy GUI, but it does almost fully work.
Just now, with the Fishwaldo Plasma distro I was able to do the following which is pretty impressive:
- Boot up and log in as pine64 (password pine64).
- Set up Wifi, which works fine.
- Run Firefox, which is somewhat slow but it works.
- Download a FOSS program, compile it and run it.
- Su as root (password pine64) and run "apt update" but there are no new packages. (e.g. GCC is version 11 but the current version is 14).
- Install ffmpeg. This runs fine, however ffplay crashes with a segmentation fault.
- Mount a USB thumb drive from the command line (it wasn't seen by Dolphin file manager).
- Convert an MP3 to WAV and play it with `aplay`, which sounded like there was interference.
Regarding Weston, when I tried to force a text-only startup (systemctl set-default multi-user), this was ignored.
I think for some people, the text-only startup option could be necessary for projects.