(ARCHIVED) Ubuntu Xenial Image (BSP Kernel)

[androsch]

I am not sure if it will help, but I just wanted to throw this out there.

I was having problems with my pine running Ubuntu dropping every few packets when running a constant ping from my windows box: "ping -t -w 25 pine"
I tried a bunch of things in software, nothing seemed to solve the problem. Out of frustration, I just unplugged the Ethernet cable, waited for 5 ping fails, then plugged it back in. After that the connection was flawless. I have no idea why it did this, but it is consistent. Every time I have weird packet loss issues, unplugging and replugging the pine into the switch "fixes" it until the next reboot. I tried swapping ports on my switch with my raspberry pi, which doesn't have this issue, but it seems specific to the pine. To me this sounds similar to what you are experiencing. If it's dropping packets, your speed tests will be significantly impacted by failed TCP packets that need to be re-sent.

I tried with 3 different switches/routers including a FritzBox 7490, actual firmware 6.50, so i don't think it may be a problem with 'some certain' switches. Even with the 100MBit mode mentioned above i'm getting max 55MBits, so this is significantly too slow and with GB-LAN its even slower.

---

Well, i do not know - i guess there are some incompatibilities with certain switches.

This is what you get with any of my images without further optimization regarding IRQ's and buffer sizes. The tests below is running Ubuntu Xenial on Pine and the other end is a ODROID-C1+ which is probably not optimal but i did not want to max out the Pine64 and instead just check _if_ i could reproduce a problem on the 2GB model.

Pine64+2GB as server:

Code:

root@pine64-2gb:~# iperf -s
------------------------------------------------------------
Server listening on TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 85.3 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[  4] local 192.168.1.59 port 5001 connected with 192.168.1.232 port 42916
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[  4]  0.0-10.0 sec   475 MBytes   398 Mbits/sec

Pine64+2GB as client:

Code:

root@pine64-2gb:~# iperf -c 192.168.1.232
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 192.168.1.232, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 22.5 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[  3] local 192.168.1.59 port 51122 connected with 192.168.1.232 port 5001
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[  3]  0.0-10.0 sec   555 MBytes   465 Mbits/sec

There are some other numbers in the forum somewhere already, including instructions how to tune things a bit more.

OK, thats impressive, comparing to my actual max. 55MBits about 9times faster. But how to get there?

[LinuxGeek]

Yup works like a charm. Thank you so much Longsleep! I installed Mate desktop on the image and wrote up a short review over at the Mate forums if anyone cares

https://ubuntu-mate.community/t/pine-64-...-mate/4775

I appreciate all of the hard work that a few in the community are doing to provide us with functional LINUX operating systems.  I have had my board for a week.  Three different SD cards, WinImager and Linux dd, images from four sites, ubuntu, arch, and debian.  Still all I get is a red power LED with no sign of booting. I have nothing connected except HDMI and power.   One SD card was reprogrammed with the latest Raspbian and booted just fine on my Pi with the same power supply and HDMI connection.  

[faddah]

i followed the instructions for this ubuntu install to the Micro SD card for the Pine A64+ board at your web site here, and it seemed to work. however, when i booted, it went through the usual linux start-up trace and i thought i would boot to the desktop, except then i got two linux stack trace errors and it stoped around line 44. any help here on make this work correctly, please? any help would be apprecia

This is minimal image pre-configured with Ethernet. Ubuntu waits 5 minutes for DHCP on boot.

thank you for replying on this, @longsleep. and i'll try letting it just run. i did have an live ethernet cable connected to the A64+ board at start-up.

however, there were two major stack trace errors that came up on the screen just before it stopped and kept sitting there. i will let it run through for 5 - 10 minutes, but it really seems frozen on that last stack trace line #44.

also, does it take 5 minutes to boot every time while waiting for DHCP, or just the first time?

thank you again for this image, the instructions, and the help.

best,

—  faddah
     portland, oregon, u.s.a.

hi @longsleep, @janjwerner & @Luke,

ok, per your instructions, i rebooted, made extra sure ethernet was attached and working, and... it works! yay! thank you for the help.

a couple more things.

i ran your script, @longsleep, from your platform scripts, to re-size the rootfs and get usage of the entire 64GB micro sd card i have, and that worked fine.

@Luke, i installed ubuntu mate from the install script that comes, and it seems to have installed fine (mostly — see further notes below). here's a pic ??




so i've gotten to the boot/log-in screen and sometimes past that to start updating and loading the software & libs i want to work with on it.

however, some things —

• this started occasionally, but now is a big problem with the board — i use it, log-in, get to the desktop, beging working with windows and moving things around and clicking when suddenly, the screen just goes blank. like completely blank, usually with some strange color tinge to it — dark green, similar to the Mate desktop, sometimes flat slate grey, sometimes grayish white. when this happens, it becomes frozen. i can't ctrl-alt-F1 to a command line prompt, there is no mouse cursor, nothing responds to the keyboard, nada, nil, nights, null - the empty set, zilch, big goose egg. the only choice is to unplug the power and re-plug it back in to restart. now, this is happening right after i successfully log-in so i never get to a desktop and can get any work done on it, everytime (a different blank screen color locking me out, each time! dark green! flat white grey!). this has also happened while trying to load software like node.js to the system. i have unplugged the Pine64 A64+ and am letting it sit and cool for a while in the hopes that will solve the immediate blank-screen-lock-out after log-in each time, but it will still be an on-going problem. any ideas on rectifying this? is it a driver thing? how do i fix this?
  
• the log-in screen does a weird thing — it asks me for my password, i put it in, it goes away as if i'm logging in, and... it comes back in. so far, i've had to log-in twice to get into the desktop every time. any way to fix this?
  
• @longsleep or anyone who knows — to flash and copy the Micro SD cards on my Mac OS X iMac, you use the 'dd' command at the terminal. is there anything else, some other utility app for Mac OS X or general *Nix that can be used on Mac OS X that is faster? thus far, it takes a little over an hour each time to flash a 64GB MicroSD that is Class-10 & UHS-3, fastest on the market. it seems to me it should just not take that long. any suggestions would be appreciated.
  

that's it — any help with the last points above would be appreciated.

best,

—  faddah
     portland, oregon, u.s.a.

[longsleep]

[*]@longsleep or anyone who knows — to flash and copy the Micro SD cards on my Mac OS X iMac, you use the 'dd' command at the terminal. is there anything else, some other utility app for Mac OS X or general *Nix that can be used on Mac OS X that is faster? thus far, it takes a little over an hour each time to flash a 64GB MicroSD that is Class-10 & UHS-3, fastest on the market. it seems to me it should just not take that long. any suggestions would be appreciated.

You are probably doing it wrong. Follow one of the various methods for Mac OS as described here: https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentatio...ges/mac.md - one of them might be much faster (especially /dev/rdisk vs /dev/disk). I do not know anything about mac. Easy fix, get rid of it and use Linux

[faddah]

[*]@longsleep or anyone who knows — to flash and copy the Micro SD cards on my Mac OS X iMac, you use the 'dd' command at the terminal. is there anything else, some other utility app for Mac OS X or general *Nix that can be used on Mac OS X that is faster? thus far, it takes a little over an hour each time to flash a 64GB MicroSD that is Class-10 & UHS-3, fastest on the market. it seems to me it should just not take that long. any suggestions would be appreciated.

[*]

You are probably doing it wrong. Follow one of the various methods for Mac OS as described here: https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentatio...ges/mac.md - one of them might be much faster (especially /dev/rdisk vs /dev/disk). I do not know anything about mac. Easy fix, get rid of it and use Linux

[*]

@longsleep —

ok, thanks for that link — i've got three more MicoSD's coming in the mail and i will try that then.

i'm glad you love linux, it's a great platform, but i don't enter into os-wars/culture-wars. i work with linux, i work with mac os x, i work with windows, all have improvied. i go where the tech and the work is, i care not what flavor it is. all have their plusses and minuses.

any ideas on the repetitive blank screens in Mate i keep getting that freeze the system?

again, thanx for the help.

best,

—  faddah
     portland, oregon, u.s.a.

[Doom4535]

Does this image currently recognize all 2 GB of ram on the 2 GB version of the pine?

[Luke]

Yup works like a charm. Thank you so much Longsleep! I installed Mate desktop on the image and wrote up a short review over at the Mate forums if anyone cares

https://ubuntu-mate.community/t/pine-64-...-mate/4775

I appreciate all of the hard work that a few in the community are doing to provide us with functional LINUX operating systems.  I have had my board for a week.  Three different SD cards, WinImager and Linux dd, images from four sites, ubuntu, arch, and debian.  Still all I get is a red power LED with no sign of booting. I have nothing connected except HDMI and power.   One SD card was reprogrammed with the latest Raspbian and booted just fine on my Pi with the same power supply and HDMI connection.  

Are you using the newest img provided by longsleep? Are you using HDMI->DVI ? Can you ssh into the board with Ethernet connected ?

[LinuxGeek]

Yup works like a charm. Thank you so much Longsleep! I installed Mate desktop on the image and wrote up a short review over at the Mate forums if anyone cares

https://ubuntu-mate.community/t/pine-64-...-mate/4775

I appreciate all of the hard work that a few in the community are doing to provide us with functional LINUX operating systems.  I have had my board for a week.  Three different SD cards, WinImager and Linux dd, images from four sites, ubuntu, arch, and debian.  Still all I get is a red power LED with no sign of booting. I have nothing connected except HDMI and power.   One SD card was reprogrammed with the latest Raspbian and booted just fine on my Pi with the same power supply and HDMI connection.  

Are you using the newest img provided by longsleep? Are you using HDMI->DVI ? Can you ssh into the board with Ethernet connected ?

Okay.  I now have a steady signal and a booted Pine64.  OS = debianpine64.   I used a different card reader and it would boot, but the screen was unstable, so I bought a cheap HDMI cable at Wal-Mart and now everything is good.  The other card reader works fine for the Raspberry Pi, but not for the Pine64.  Another option to look into if anyone is having problems with a usable SD card.  I am connected to a 32" TV and the display is cutting off the first four letters of the line, but I can work with that.   Next to find a function WiFi dongle.

[longsleep]

Does this image currently recognize all 2 GB of ram on the 2 GB version of the pine?

Sure.

[Hart]

Yup works like a charm. Thank you so much Longsleep! I installed Mate desktop on the image and wrote up a short review over at the Mate forums if anyone cares

https://ubuntu-mate.community/t/pine-64-...-mate/4775

I appreciate all of the hard work that a few in the community are doing to provide us with functional LINUX operating systems.  I have had my board for a week.  Three different SD cards, WinImager and Linux dd, images from four sites, ubuntu, arch, and debian.  Still all I get is a red power LED with no sign of booting. I have nothing connected except HDMI and power.   One SD card was reprogrammed with the latest Raspbian and booted just fine on my Pi with the same power supply and HDMI connection.  

Are you using the newest img provided by longsleep? Are you using HDMI->DVI ? Can you ssh into the board with Ethernet connected ?

Okay.  I now have a steady signal and a booted Pine64.  OS = debianpine64.   I used a different card reader and it would boot, but the screen was unstable, so I bought a cheap HDMI cable at Wal-Mart and now everything is good.  The other card reader works fine for the Raspberry Pi, but not for the Pine64.  Another option to look into if anyone is having problems with a usable SD card.  I am connected to a 32" TV and the display is cutting off the first four letters of the line, but I can work with that.   Next to find a function WiFi dongle.

   I have had pretty good luck using Rufus instead of Winimager. Only problem I have now apart from lack of hardware video acceleration is sound. It breaks up like it is oscillating. I tried installing the restricted package with proprietary codecs but same thing. Can't play an MP3.