OS's for the Rock64

[richprim]

I found a way to install a number of OS's on the Rock64.
This may already be known but I thought I might pass it along.
1 Install bionic-minimal-rock64-0.6.44-139-arm64.img on you SD or eMMC card, or what ever is the current stable version
2Run bionic-minimal program, login (usually name=rock64 and pw=rock64.
3Now at the prompt issue   sudo apt-get install tasksel
4Next run   sudo tasksel and you will be presented with a list of OS's.
5With the curser move to the OS you want, I selected ubuntu mate that seems to run fairly good on the rock64
6Use the SPACE bar to select the OS, then tab to the OK and hit the ENTER key.
It may take some time to load.
Ubuntu Mate works great for me.

Rich Prim  

[fire219]

This certainly gives the appearance of multi-booting, but it's technically not. It just will run/kill the different programs (in this case pretty much just the different desktop environments) needed to effectively be that flavor of Ubuntu (or Debian). An easier way (assuming you're booting from a graphics-equipped images) would be to just install the different DEs and use this button at login which gives a menu like this.

You wouldn't be able to run Fedora or NetBSD in this way, for example.

[richprim]

I had loaded the bionic minimal rock64 and this just gave me a command prompt.
I used the tasksel to install the mate desktop.

Maybe i installed the wrong thing, I used the pine installer IE etcher.

Kind of a newbe with the rock 64, just got it this week.
I bought it mainly to replace my Raspberrypi as a faster NAS using openmediavault.
And wow it is faster for sure.

Looking forward to some improvements in the OMV supplied by your group.
I got version 0.6.44-239 working but it won't accept the password (openmediavault) when trying to log in via SSL.
When I try locally to go to omv-firstaid to set a static ip address as I type it outputs string of code with every key stroke.

Keep up the great work, this board is a great improvement over the Raspberrypi for NAS use.

Rich Prim

---

Going to SSH and clicking on "allow root login " fixed the rejection of the openmediavault passwork being rejected.
But when I tried to use omv-firstaid to set a ip address the below was the response from the board.

ERROR: dialog-like terminated due to an error: the dialog-like program exited with status 3 (which was passed to it as the DIALOG_ERROR environment variable). Sometimes, the reason is simply that dialog was given a height or width parameter that is too big for the terminal in use. Its output, with leading and trailing whitespace stripped, was:

Error: Expected at least 5 tokens for --menu, have 4.
Use --help to list options.
root@rock64:~#

[pfeerick]

Yup, from the release notes:

OMV: admin/openmediavault (for Web), root/openmediavault (for Console). To enable SSH for OMV go to Web > SSH > Permit Root Login > Save > Apply

Can you not set the IP from the web? The error suggests the SSH console window was too big, or an unknown error... have you tried with a more standard sized 80 x 25 SSH window... just in case

As far as the console giving a message with every keystroke, that is a known issue - have a look at this post/thread if you want to fix that up