New RockPro64 Power Up Problem

[TRS-80]

Speaking of which while I never owned a "Trash-80", my very first PC was a Tandy 8086 with an ancient WD IDE 20MB hard drive on an ISA card and one of my favorite memories is the day I removed it while starting up and was messing with it when to my amazement the CGA screen lit up and there was...a.. desktop!  in ROM!!  Visions of a subconscious filled my imagination LOL

I, too, have many fond memories of writing Mad Libs in BASIC with my brother and friends, as well as old dial up BBS pre-Internet days, etc.  I used a TRS-80 at school, but we had a Tandy 1000EX at home, actually.  Due to 'life', I veered away from my natural interests in tech for a long time, but the last several years I have been making up for that now.

So far I've played with 7 distros, 2 different (Leap and Tumbleweed) from OpenSuse, 2 diffewrent Armbian and OpenMediaVault (which is also Armbian IIRC), Manjaro, NEMS and NetBSD.  The only one that supported all my hardware was Aarch Slackware64 probably due to the 5.17.4 kernel especially since I'm using BTRFS on my RAID and those modules need constant updating as it is being developed so aggressively.

Wow, you have been busy!  Personally, my interests lie more in things 'just working' so I can self-host my own services (to stay away from 'The Cloud' and predatory big tech).

And yes, OMV is in fact derived from Armbian.  There are some other distros which are, as well.  Armbian provides a nice reliable base for things like this.

All these distros need constant upgrading, and therein lie the rub.  Armbian have done an amazing job for years now supporting over 100 boards, but had to scale back more recently as they are after all only a few guys working on nights and weekends.  In fact I have always been amazed they were able to do so much for so long.  So at some point I started helping them out around the forums, docs, etc. a bit (as I am sure no kernel hacker).

In that same form I'm, learning what is required to build packages from source on ARM because as badly as Suse's conky package runs (I think it leaves out important dependencies like luajit or imblib2) it is still great to be able to monitor exactly what I want to see, no more, no less so hopefully I can improve it in Slack.

Armbian does a lot of cross-compilation, but they are only building kernel and u-boot, etc.  Almost all userspace packages simply come from upstream Debian (or Ubuntu).  But maybe there is something there in the CI pipeline which might be useful for you.

At the same time I'm working to understand NetBSD better 'cuz ZFS is terrific!  That said BTRFS is rapidly evolving so maybe it will catch up.

Using BSD is no longer necessary to use ZFS (that used to be recommended, but that was years ago now).  In fact, The ZFS on Linux project (now OpenZFS) received a tremendous amount of development effort since years now to get ZFS running well on Linux.

I am running ZFS on ROCKPro64, with a standard PCIe to SATA adapter and it works well.  All you really need is 64-bit Linux.  Even those high RAM recommendations are not really usually necessary (well, depending).

I actually had a lengthy debate with a very knowledgeable guy (tkaiser) about ZFS and BTRFS a while back, it's long but maybe you find some of it interesting: Why I prefer ZFS over btrfs

Best wishes, mate

Same to you!