Star64: All listed distros don't boot
#1
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:
  1. Boot up and log in as pine64 (password pine64).
  2. Set up Wifi, which works fine.
  3. Run Firefox, which is somewhat slow but it works.
  4. Download a FOSS program, compile it and run it.
  5. 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).
  6. Install ffmpeg. This runs fine, however ffplay crashes with a segmentation fault.
  7. Mount a USB thumb drive from the command line (it wasn't seen by Dolphin file manager).
  8. 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.
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Messages In This Thread
Star64: All listed distros don't boot - by tantamount - 05-08-2026, 08:56 AM

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