Hi Fabian, > As Peter requested :-) Thanks for this, response and details in line. > During the last three weeks I attended two conferences. In India we > wanted to have actual hardware to allow the participants of the training > to do their exercises and the attendees of the crypto currencies village > see how it works. Interesting, is there details about the crypto currencies side of this somewhere? > I'm going to split it. Covering the Orange Pi devices here and the > Raspberry Pi and the UDOO Neo in another message. > > I decided to go with three Orange Pi Zero. They are easy to carry > around, have a physical NIC, are cheap and with a big powerbank we were > able to survive the power outages with are happening from time to time > there. > > Of course, we wanted to run Fedora but I ended up using Armbian. I was > using fedora-arm-image-installer to create the cards. > > # fedora-arm-image-installer \ > --image=Fedora-Server-armhfp-27-1.6-sda.raw.xz > --target=orangepi_zero --media=/dev/mmcblk0 --resizefs > > To get some feedback I connected a serial converter to the Orange Pi > Zero. The output is visible but minicom doesn't allow me to log in aka > doesn't accept any input no matter of minicom's settings. Same result > with a different adapter. My guess is that it would work if you know how > to do it as in a lot of cases it's the only way to get the details or > perform the initial setup. The serial support here should just work, the AllWinner stuff has been pretty stable for ages and is basically the same across all devices. There have been reports of the Zero working just fine with serial consoles. I personally tend to use screen here because minicom's general attempts to init modems and the like has caused me problems in the past. "screen /dev/ttyUSB0 115200" should work, the only time I've ever had issues with RX and no TX was when then TX was pinned wrong. I would be very interested in debugging this with you if you have the interest. > According to the serial output the Orange Pi Zero should be available > over the network. It doesn't show me its IP address but that's fine. OK, > if are not using network which you have some sort of control over it > then it would be handy if you get the IP address from the serial output. Suggestions on how to implement this would be welcome, the server image does this already via cockpit. > In the meantime were three SD card ready with Armbian and I stopped. The > reason is simple: Armbian is more plug-and-play than Fedora. The initial > configuration can be done over SSH and I don't wanted to waste more time > on getting Fedora running without any indication of success. There's an explicit reason we don't allow ssh before setting username/passwords, security. I've heard from another distro on a well known board which has a passwordless root login to allow config like this that their devices have been used in known bot nets. The general consenus here is that the best way to stop this is to force usernam creation and password setting on the console, else people tend to be lazy and leave it at the defaults. We have some functionality here with the --addkey= option of arm-image-installer which unlocks the root account and adds a ssh key. Suggestions on how to improve this experience while keeping a high level of security again would be welcome, or details of how armbian does it. > The next one was an Orange Pi PC. Reason to use was the HDMI output > which would make it possible to attach the unit to a projector. The H3 (all the H-series and A64 SoCs) don't have any level of upstream support for HDMI at all. In the 4.13 kernel that shipped with F-27 this would have been well over 100 non upstream (not even accepted upstream) patches to maintain across a number of kernel cycles and constantly rebase. Even when they do land upstream, some went into 4.16 and a lot more will be in 4.17, with luck this should be complete in 4.18, there won't be accelerated graphics to run with Workstation because the GPU is MALI and there's not yet an open driver for it. Best we'll be able to hope for in the medium future here is something like XFCE. > Workstation image instead of Server this time. > > # fedora-arm-image-installer \ > --image=Fedora-Workstation-armhfp-27-1.6-sda.raw.xz \ > --target=orangepi_pc --media=/dev/mmcblk0 --resizefs > > Device starts running, no graphical output. Perhaps broken...no, works > fine with Armbian. Perhaps is the screen not playing nice with Fedora. > Other screen, same result. There is no upstream support at all for HDMI, what kernel does Armbian use? It must be either a heavily patched upstream or a vendor BSP kernel. > Let's test the Orange Mini (that one is approx. the same age as the > Orange Pi PC). Same image, different target. After a couple of seconds > the LED went on but not HDMI output. Same, I'm actually got on my list to look at the patch set for HDMI to give us basic text console output on 4.16 in F-28, I think to do that across H3/H5/A64 SoCs we're looking at around 60 patches on top of 4.16 across clock/gpu and other areas of the kernel. It's a lot to maintain, it's actually more than all our patches for ARM* combined ATM but should be mostly gone for 4.17. All those devices should work with serial console with network and USB though if that's deemed useful. Peter _______________________________________________ arm mailing list -- arm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to arm-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
