Will PINE A64+ (2GB) be ever ready for the makers?

[aromring]

I've supported PINE64 project from its beginning. I wanted to use it for my electronics projects as a self-contained unit (i.e., without lugging a big monitor, Ethernet cable, mouse/keyboard, etc.). This means it has to work with the LCD touch panel sold along with it.

I have tested the following three OSs with these criteria:
1) The OS has to support GPIO access
2) The OS has to support working WiFi
3) The OS has to support LCD Touch panel

Here are the results:

Android 6.0.1: 2) and 3), but not 1)
Android 7.1: 1) and 2), but not 3)
openSUSE for PINE64: 1) and 3), but not 2) (astonishingly, it does not want to work with the Realtek WiFi driver!)

Is there ANY operating system out there that supports 1), 2), and 3)? Will there ever be?

[tommypine]

Yes Armbian

http://www.armbian.com/pine64/

[pfeerick]

As Tommypine said, Armbian has support all three for quite a while

ayufan's xenial images should also support 1 and 2 without any issue, and have at least the display output for 3) (probably with a settings change in uEnv.txt) but I'm not sure about the touchscreen support OOTB.

[aromring]

As Tommypine said, Armbian has support all three for quite a while

ayufan's xenial images should also support 1 and 2 without any issue, and have at least the display output for 3) (probably with a settings change in uEnv.txt) but I'm not sure about the touchscreen support OOTB.

Many thanks to both of you! I had no idea Armbian can support LCD because PINE64 Wiki is misleading in this respect:
http://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/Pine_A6...se#Armbian mentions nothing about it, while openSUSE just above it has in bold letters: 
"

• As of 7/12/2016 an image supporting the official LCD is available.
  

"
Hence, if someone searches the page for "LCD" only Android and SUSE show up.
Ayufan's Android 7.1 used to support LCD, but the last built 0.3.5 is broken (see his Github page for issues). I did not know about his Xenial's support the same way I didn't know about Armbian's - the Wiki page has nothing about it.

[aromring]

WOW, I am blown away by Armbian! Installation was super easy, it connected to WiFi right away, desktop was right there without any extra effort, all menus are very responsive, and all it took to work on LCD was "pine64_lcd=on" in the /boot/armbianEnv.txt config file. By the way, I didn't do the second step of adding gt9xx_f_ts to /etc/modules and LCD still works - is that normal?

I can't believe I wasted an entire weekend trying to make the very slow and unresponsive openSUSE connect to my WiFi! 

Thank you again, I am definitely making a donation to Armbian team!

[pfeerick]

I believe the second second step is only needed to enable the 'touch' part of the touchscreen support.

I hope you downloaded direct from the Armbian site, as the pine64 images that are hosted on the pine64 servers and linked to the wiki (5.25) are a few months old now... and Armbian was up to 5.32 last I checked... so you'd have just a few updates ahead of you

[MarkHaysHarris777]

I've supported PINE64 project from its beginning. <snip>

I have tested the following three OSs with these criteria:
1) The OS has to support GPIO access
2) The OS has to support working WiFi
3) The OS has to support LCD Touch panel

<snip>
Is there ANY operating system out there that supports 1), 2), and 3)? Will there ever be?

Certainly.  I've been running debian 3.10.102 ( from the beginning ) and it has always supported 1), 2) and 3) !

... now full disclosure -- I don't use the LCD touch panel;  after testing it I pulled it off and laid it aside.  But, it works !

Armbian is really good;  go with that for sure.  But remember that different combinations exist for different purposes, and something doesn't have to support everything all the time .

[tommypine]

One thing to mention about the "pine64_lcd=on" setting.
If you want to use pure HDMI again instead of LCD by settimng the "pine64_lcd=off" you have to pull out the LCD cable, otherwise Armbian won't boot up anymore.
In my opinion Armbian is great too.... , i have running MQTT Mosquito Server, Mysql, PHP, Apache on it at a glance.

[aromring]

Gentlemen,
Thank you very much for insightful responses. 
I think I've stumbled upon a roadblock in Armbian, though. I want to enable SPI in it and according to
https://docs.armbian.com/User-Guide_Allw...e-overlays
it should be simple:  edit armbianEnv.txt and add "spi-spidev" to "overlays". In fact, any kernel provided overlays should be in /boot/dtb/overlay/ or /boot/dtb/allwinner/overlay/ folders. Well, that's the problem: the Armbian 5.30 I downloaded for my PINE64 has no such folders. In fact, /boot/dtb has no subfolders at all. Is documentation outdated? Is Armbian. 5.30 deficient? What am I missing?

[martinayotte]

Are you sure you are running an Armbian image ?
Is it an old image that you've tried to upgrade or complete new image ?
What is displayed while doing "cat /etc/armbian-release" ?