03-30-2016, 09:33 PM
I wanted to quickly share my experience tonight trying to get Android (or Remix OS) up and running. It may help explain why it's different for everyone. I apologize for lapsing into storytelling mode; skip to the end for the summary.
Anyway, I'm fairly geeky but my primary machine is a Mac. My board came today and I naively assumed it would be as "simple as pi" to get it running: dd an image onto a microSD card and away you go. Of course as I learned, that's not the way we do things here (although why not supply a simple image?).
I downloaded three OSes: arch-pine64-bspkernel-20160304-1-xfce4, Pinea64_android_lollipop_db1000_20160216, and RemixOS_pine64_B2016022702_1000MB_LAN_Beta. I started with Arch because it didn't require Windows or PhoenixCard to get it installed: "pv arch-pine64-bspkernel-20160304-1-xfce4.img > /dev/rdisk5" did the trick. But my first fail was here: I wasted a lot of time thinking there was something wrong with the image or the card, when it was my USB power adapter. I used to have a nice beefy one set up for playing with new single board computers, but it recently crapped out and I temporarily substituted another one from the parts drawer. Turns out it wasn't good enough. When that dawned on me, I hooked up a USB cable to a bench power supply, cranked it up to 5.1V/2.1A and let 'er rip, and it booted just fine into Arch Linux. 5 minutes of that was enough, I really wanted to see Android, so the real time sink begins here.
Once I gave up searching for alternatives to PhoenixCard and accepted that I'd have to deal with it, I figured I'd just dust off my Windows 10 VMWare Fusion image (which hasn't been started since last August) and use that. And indeed, it all seemed to work fine: PhoenixCard claimed to successfully write the RemixOS image to my 64GB Samsung Evo card. Popped it into the Pine and got nothing (apart from the red LED). It wasn't a matter of not waiting long enough, I waited and waited, and the current draw was a steady 130mA the whole time. Clearly not starting up.
Things get a bit fuzzy here since I tried so many different things: three different microSD cards, both the Lollipop and RemixOS images, three different SD card readers, internal USB ports and the ones on a Thunderbolt docking station, three different USB hubs in between the computer and the card reader, USB 2.0, USB 3, all the VMware compatibility settings, reinstalling VMware tools, rebooting the VM and the Mac, plugging the microSD card into an adapter to use SD card readers, writing to a USB stick instead (intending to dd it to the microSD card afterward), and all of these things alternating with SD Card Formatter voodoo. It was frustrating the crap out of me because I know the thing works with Arch, but I could not get a working Android image to save my life. Worse yet, different combinations of hardware produced different behavior: most of the time PhoenixCard would error out, but sometimes halfway through the "burn" process, other times failing right at first formatting step, occasionally locking up Windows' USB and requiring the card reader to be unplugged. Sometimes the SD Formatter utility worked but PhoenixCard produced formatting errors. Sometimes the other way around. Sometimes neither. And yet with my original configuration (and only that one: an "Inland All-In-One USB 3.0 Card Reader" plugged directly into the Mac) PhoenixCard would appear to work but produce a card that doesn't boot.
At that point, several hours into it, I decided to start blaming VMware, or at least look at the variables:
PhoenixCard is apparently the only game in town, so that has to stay. I already tried three card readers. I have a known-good card that works for Arch (and tried two others anyway). I don't have any other Windows operating systems than 10. But I could take the VM out of the equation: I have one "bare-metal" Windows computer, a Lenovo PC-on-a-stick which also runs Windows 10.
So I dug that thing out, transferred the necessary files onto it, and expected everything to work perfectly. It even has an internal microSD card slot, so I didn't have to mess with a USB card reader. Press Burn in PhoenixCard and.. formatting as normal works.. burn fails right after formatting. WTF. Card seems to work fine for everything but PhoenixCard won't chooch. Ok, let's try plugging a card reader into it: different errors depending on which one I use, just like with VMware. Sometimes it won't format, sometimes gets halfway through and errors out, sometimes craps out completely and needs to be unplugged. Absolute madness. Now I'm down to my last attempt: inland SD card reader #2 plugged into the USB 3.0 port of a Purex mini hub (the USB 2 ports had already been tried and failed). And the f'ing thing worked. PhoenixCard completed the "burn", and unlike the burn-but-no-worky attempts where it seemed to finish too quickly for the size of the file, this one was slow and steady. And when I put the card in the Pine 64, it drew a respectable 800mA and booted into Remix OS. Of course, when I plug in the Ethernet, it reboots, so I apparently can't have it all. But that's a different problem.
IN CONCLUSION, in addition to the Pine 64 being picky about voltages and current and which card you use and whether stuff is plugged into the ports, PhoenixCard is also incredibly picky about which card reader you use to write the thing, and how it's attached to your computer (to the point of only working with a specific card reader plugged into a specific port on a specific USB hub), and on top of that may not work with some computers at all. Oh, and for bonus points, one of its failure modes is to appear to work while writing a card that doesn't boot at all. You pretty much have to be lucky, or have a bunch of hardware around to keep trying more combinations until you hit the jackpot. If I didn't have that stick PC and a couple of extra hubs and card readers I grabbed from the bargain bin at Micro Center, I never would have gotten mine working.
Anyway, I'm fairly geeky but my primary machine is a Mac. My board came today and I naively assumed it would be as "simple as pi" to get it running: dd an image onto a microSD card and away you go. Of course as I learned, that's not the way we do things here (although why not supply a simple image?).
I downloaded three OSes: arch-pine64-bspkernel-20160304-1-xfce4, Pinea64_android_lollipop_db1000_20160216, and RemixOS_pine64_B2016022702_1000MB_LAN_Beta. I started with Arch because it didn't require Windows or PhoenixCard to get it installed: "pv arch-pine64-bspkernel-20160304-1-xfce4.img > /dev/rdisk5" did the trick. But my first fail was here: I wasted a lot of time thinking there was something wrong with the image or the card, when it was my USB power adapter. I used to have a nice beefy one set up for playing with new single board computers, but it recently crapped out and I temporarily substituted another one from the parts drawer. Turns out it wasn't good enough. When that dawned on me, I hooked up a USB cable to a bench power supply, cranked it up to 5.1V/2.1A and let 'er rip, and it booted just fine into Arch Linux. 5 minutes of that was enough, I really wanted to see Android, so the real time sink begins here.
Once I gave up searching for alternatives to PhoenixCard and accepted that I'd have to deal with it, I figured I'd just dust off my Windows 10 VMWare Fusion image (which hasn't been started since last August) and use that. And indeed, it all seemed to work fine: PhoenixCard claimed to successfully write the RemixOS image to my 64GB Samsung Evo card. Popped it into the Pine and got nothing (apart from the red LED). It wasn't a matter of not waiting long enough, I waited and waited, and the current draw was a steady 130mA the whole time. Clearly not starting up.
Things get a bit fuzzy here since I tried so many different things: three different microSD cards, both the Lollipop and RemixOS images, three different SD card readers, internal USB ports and the ones on a Thunderbolt docking station, three different USB hubs in between the computer and the card reader, USB 2.0, USB 3, all the VMware compatibility settings, reinstalling VMware tools, rebooting the VM and the Mac, plugging the microSD card into an adapter to use SD card readers, writing to a USB stick instead (intending to dd it to the microSD card afterward), and all of these things alternating with SD Card Formatter voodoo. It was frustrating the crap out of me because I know the thing works with Arch, but I could not get a working Android image to save my life. Worse yet, different combinations of hardware produced different behavior: most of the time PhoenixCard would error out, but sometimes halfway through the "burn" process, other times failing right at first formatting step, occasionally locking up Windows' USB and requiring the card reader to be unplugged. Sometimes the SD Formatter utility worked but PhoenixCard produced formatting errors. Sometimes the other way around. Sometimes neither. And yet with my original configuration (and only that one: an "Inland All-In-One USB 3.0 Card Reader" plugged directly into the Mac) PhoenixCard would appear to work but produce a card that doesn't boot.
At that point, several hours into it, I decided to start blaming VMware, or at least look at the variables:
- Mac + VMware Fusion
- Windows 10
- PhoenixCard
- microSD card
- Card reader
PhoenixCard is apparently the only game in town, so that has to stay. I already tried three card readers. I have a known-good card that works for Arch (and tried two others anyway). I don't have any other Windows operating systems than 10. But I could take the VM out of the equation: I have one "bare-metal" Windows computer, a Lenovo PC-on-a-stick which also runs Windows 10.
So I dug that thing out, transferred the necessary files onto it, and expected everything to work perfectly. It even has an internal microSD card slot, so I didn't have to mess with a USB card reader. Press Burn in PhoenixCard and.. formatting as normal works.. burn fails right after formatting. WTF. Card seems to work fine for everything but PhoenixCard won't chooch. Ok, let's try plugging a card reader into it: different errors depending on which one I use, just like with VMware. Sometimes it won't format, sometimes gets halfway through and errors out, sometimes craps out completely and needs to be unplugged. Absolute madness. Now I'm down to my last attempt: inland SD card reader #2 plugged into the USB 3.0 port of a Purex mini hub (the USB 2 ports had already been tried and failed). And the f'ing thing worked. PhoenixCard completed the "burn", and unlike the burn-but-no-worky attempts where it seemed to finish too quickly for the size of the file, this one was slow and steady. And when I put the card in the Pine 64, it drew a respectable 800mA and booted into Remix OS. Of course, when I plug in the Ethernet, it reboots, so I apparently can't have it all. But that's a different problem.
IN CONCLUSION, in addition to the Pine 64 being picky about voltages and current and which card you use and whether stuff is plugged into the ports, PhoenixCard is also incredibly picky about which card reader you use to write the thing, and how it's attached to your computer (to the point of only working with a specific card reader plugged into a specific port on a specific USB hub), and on top of that may not work with some computers at all. Oh, and for bonus points, one of its failure modes is to appear to work while writing a card that doesn't boot at all. You pretty much have to be lucky, or have a bunch of hardware around to keep trying more combinations until you hit the jackpot. If I didn't have that stick PC and a couple of extra hubs and card readers I grabbed from the bargain bin at Micro Center, I never would have gotten mine working.