Reviews, Tutorials, Hardware hacks

Hi all. In my latest video I test an Armbian image for X86/AMD64. I try it on the Rock Pi X. This also works on any other x86 pc. This is just a preview of what is possible. It is not an official release in any way. Armbian is only supported on ARM single board computer. But hell it is nice to use it on this too. Big thanks to all the Armbian developers. Greetings, NicoD

Hi all. In this video I show how to use armbian-gamingX86. A script to install Steam, PPSSPP, Retropie and Xonotic on Armbian Jammy/Noble X86. Here link to armbian-gamingX86 : https://github.com/NicoD-SBC/armbian-gamingX86 Here my video about it. Cheers, NicoD

Hi all. I just made a video where I show how to build your own Armbian images on Windows. It used to be that you needed a virtualMachine running Linux but these days you can use WSL2. Here the video : Greetings, NicoD

Hi all. In my latest video I compare the Odroids HC4 and N2+, RPi400, NanoPi M4 and Radxa Zero with each other. I make a "NicoD opinion benchmark" where I give my thought on what each board is best for. And of course benchmarks... Greetings, NicoD For those interested, here are all my benchmarks of the last weeks. Spoiler Board | SBC-Bench | Distro | Clockspeeds | 7z all cores | 7z small core | 7z big core | CPU-Miner | NicoD-Blender | Max temp Radxa Zero http://ix.io/3PlT Radxa Buster xfce4 5.10 1.8Ghz …

My gathered info : RK3588(S) comparison -------------------- RK3588(S) 8nm LP process 4 x A55 @ 1.8Ghz + 4 x A76 @ 2.4Ghz (Not the same for all boards, between 2.2Ghz and 2.4Ghz) Mali-G610 MP4 "Odin" 6TOPs NPU Up to 32GB memory theoretically (haven't seen any 32GB yet) RK3588 RK3588S PCIE3.0 2x2 Lanes PCIe3.0 N/A PCIe2.0/SATA3.0/USB3.0 MUX 3x1 Lane PCIE2.0 2x1 Lane PCIE2.0 3x SATA 3.0 2x SATA 3.0 1x USB3.0 (refer USB section) 1x USB3.0 (refer USB section) Board …

Panfrost Gaming benchmarks with RK3399, Amlogic S922x and RK3588. Testing native supertuxkart, box64 Xonotic and wine32/box86 Viper Racing. RK3399 and AMLS922X done on Armbian Jammy, RK3588 Ubuntu Jammy (22.04)

Hi all. I've made a new video about how to build your own Armbian image with the Armbian build script. I also show how to set up virtualbox with a Ubuntu 18.04 image. Here's the video. Greetings, NicoD

Hi all. I made a new video on how to build Armbian images. These days you can use your ARM64 SBC to do this. For Windows users there's WSL2 you can use. Here my video about that. Greetings, NicoD

Hi all. I've made a new noob video on how to install Armbian on an SBC. I also show how I set up my Armbian desktop. And I show how to install Armbian onto another media. https://youtu.be/pnxUctyqx4c Greetings, NicoD

Hi all. In this video I show how to install Open Media Vault on your SBC with Armbian Buster. I've used the Odroid HC4, this is the same for any board you'd like to use. Here my video. Greetings. NicoD

Hi all. I've done an interview with Igor from Armbian. We talked about the new release that's coming this weekend. And about armbian-next, the new updated build framework.

Hi all. I've just finished making my review video about the Khadas Edge2. No Armbian on it(yet). It is an awesome board, and I'm very happy to have it. I'm still waiting on my Rock5B to arrive, so this helped me overcome this period. But it does have its limits. For some goals it is perfect, some others not so much. Here my video. Greetings, NicoD

Hi all. In my latest video I make an Armbian Build server out of my old x86 PC. And I set up an extra Odroid HC4 as NAS with the old hard drives from my PC. I hope you'll like it, greetings. NicoD

Hi all. I've made a new video where I test all storage devices for the NanoPi M4. 8GB, 16GB and 32GB eMMC modules, NVMe drive, sd-card and SSD over USB3. Here's the video. Here's my gathered data. Storage speeds -------------- 8GB eMMC module read : 160 MB/s write : 11 MB/s 16GB eMMC module read : 175 MB/s write : 50 MB/s 32GB eMMC module read : 173 MB/s write : 111.6 MB/s 256GB NVMe read : 697.7 MB/s write : 401 MB/s (630MB/s for 2.5GB, then 300 MB/s) M4 sd-card read : 70 MB/s write : 20 MB/s …

Hi all. I've just finished a new video where I show how to build Armbian images on your ARM SBC. Here is the video. All have a jolly good Christmas or other holiday or normal day.

Hi all. Here my review of the Orange Pi 5 Plus with Armbian Jammy. I show tips for better desktop experience, show how to build your own images, how to run games, and tons of info about the board. Here's the video : For those who rather read, here's my gathered data : https://docs.lane-fu.com/s/5IxGlf4gn Greetings, NicoD

Hi all. I've just finished a new video where I review an Amazon AWS Graviton2 arm64 server. This is a monster with 64 high-performance N1 cores. It isn't clocked that high at 2.5Ghz, but it performs amazing for that clockspeed. Here is my video. Here all the info I've gathered. AWS Server 32-cores 128GB ------------------------- NEOVERSE N1 64-core AWS Graviton2 ARMv8.2 aarch64 Arm’s Neoverse N1 cores -> based on A76 -> almost identical to Arm’s 64-core reference N1 platform -> CPU cores are clocked a bit lower 2.5GHz and only 32MB instead of 64MB of L3 cache Max speed 2500Mhz 8-channel DDR-3200 128GB ram 64 PCIe4 lanes TSMC’s 7…

Hi all. Here my video about the MangoPi MQ-Pro. It's not powerful, not cheap and not great at anything. But it is nice to see it works. Everybody started out as a baby. So it now needs to grow. Spoiler MangoPi MQ-Pro 1GB ------------------ https://bret.dk/armbian-on-the-mangopi-mq-pro/ Armbian Jammy xfce4 5.19 ------------------------ Idle temp 57C Max temp 63C Blender NicoD 8h34m 7z b 573 Armbian Jammy 5.19 headless without display or usb connected with wifi ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Idle temp 47C Max temp 50C Blender NicoD …

Hi all. Here my review of the Mekotronics R58-Mini and R58X-4G. These are my favorite RK3588 devices. Easiest to work with on a desk. Been my main-desktop for the last months. I've been using MonkaBlyat his Armbian images. It is stable, fun to work with, has GPU drivers and VPU. But it is using the dirty rockchip kernel. So once armbian can be build for these devices, and mainline has matured these should be the best RK3588 devices for me at home. For on the road I've got the Kadas Edge2Pro. Here's my video. Mekotronics download page : https://www.mekotronics.com/h-msgBoard.html Armbian from MonkaBlyat for R58-Mini : https://m…

Hi all. Here my review video about the Mixtile Blade 3. An RK3588 ARM SBC with a special connector to make it possible to connect multiple of these boards in a cluster. But it can also be used well as desktop or server device. It has all the bells and whistle's an RK3588 can have like dual 2.5GbE, m-PCIe, NVMe, HDMI-out + 2 x DP on USB-C and HMDI-in, ... Here is my video : Greetings, NicoD

Hi all. I've just made a review video about the RPi400. I tested RPiOS, Manjaro and Armbian. All my gathered info under the video. Benchmarks Board | SBC-Bench | Distro | Clockspeeds | 7z all cores | 7z small core | 7z big core | CPU-Miner | NicoD-Blender | Max temp | C copy backwards NanoPi M4 2GB http://ix.io/3xnJ Armbian Hirsute xfce4 5.13.12 1.4Ghz/1.8Ghz 7760 1267 1857 10.05 14m41s 78C *** 1782.9 MB/s NanoPi M4 2GB http://ix.io/3xv3 Ar…

Hi all. I recently bought the Odroid Go Super. It is a great handheld for emulation gaming. But that isn't the main reason why I bought it. It can also run Linux, tho not Armbian. In this video I show how I use Debian Buster from Meveric on the Odroid Go Super and I also review the hardware. Greetings.

Hi all. I just finished my review video about the Tanix TX6. Here it is. Greetings, NicoD

Hi all. In this video I test the KDE Plasma desktop on Armbian Jammy. It ain't perfect. It needs some fixes to be workable. I show what to do to install and fix. Here's the video. Greetings.

Hi all. In my latest video I test the new Armbian 22.02 images on RK3399. I use the NanoPi M4. But it should be about the same for other RK3399 devices. Long story short. Jammy xfce 5.16 performs better. And has the better performing browser. Focal xfce 5.15 firefox is not HW-acc. Chromium is, but performs badly. Also bad blender result. Not all cores are used to the max. I've never seen this behaviour. So I would use the Jammy xfce 5.16 image. But I'm still using an older image that work. So I'm not upgrading. Greetings, NicoD

Hi all. @Werner and I have been working on an instruction video on how to install Armbian headless on your SBC. Here it is. Greetings, NicoD

Hi all. I've done a collaboration with @Igor, the creator of Armbian. He shows and talks about the hardware that is used to maintain the project. Servers, boards, other electronics, ... Enjoy! More videos to come.

I am trying to use a Waveshare e-Paper (2.9") with an Orange Pi Zero LTS. To enable the SPI interface, I have added this to /boot/armbianEnv.txt: overlays=spi-add-cs1 spi-spidev param_spidev_spi_bus=1 param_spidev_max_freq=10000000 and installed WiringPI from Github. The e-Paper module is connected to the following GPIO pins: VCC: 3.3V GND: GND DIN: 19(phys)/11(wPi) CLK: 23(phys)/14(wPi) CS: 24(phys)/15(wPi) DC: 22(phys)/13(wPi) RST: 3(phys)/0(wPi) BUSY: 5(phys)/1(wPi) I have checked the connections by using the gpio command line tool to set all 6 ports above to low and to high, and verifying the output with a multimeter. Then I downloaded the e-…

As already done with other topics this will be the start of a new thread collecting more information over time. Since we had a lot of annoying discussions recently regarding Wi-Fi on Orange Pi Zero and in general I thought let's give it a try a few days ago. I did some preparations in the meantime (monitoring 24/7 Wi-Fi throughput in 2.4 GHz band for example) and then started to test in a not too crowded environment here. As a start some quick Wi-Fi tests with a random 'quality' USB Wi-Fi dongle and 3 different Wi-Fi chipsets that can be found an a few boards Armbian supports: RTL8192CU (used on a lot of cheap USB dongles and even on …

The original discussion thread is this Reposting this below just in case it may be useful ---- how i set it up https://gist.github.com/ag88/de02933ba65500376d1ff48e504b1bf3 --- Imho for WiFi purposes nmcli (network manager cli) is not very different from hostapd, just that hostapd possibly has more configuration options. To setup an access point, there are quite a few pieces of network configuration that needs to be setup: The WiFi AP itself (e.g. using network manager or hostapd) if you are able to connect and verify that in the log, that is probably solved. e.g. journalctl -u NetworkManager o…

Is not important, and is a topic related to desktop environment and I know that armbian is more a server OS than a dektop replacement ... but I'm stuck trying to have all the environment in my mother language, Spanish. I change locale in root user and in the additionally created desktop user, I use dpkg-reconfigure locales locales and also export LANGUAGE=es_ES.UTF-8 but after reboot is again in English. And also when I update and upgrade the system I can see Translation-en logs but never a Translation-es. Is there any chance to do a better localization of the Desktop Environment? Thanks.

EDIT: Solution in next post (this started as a question; yeah maybe I should have split it, but whatever). Apologies if this is dumb question. I finally got my hands on some appropriate (64-bit) hardware, and ready to install software now. I have read so many threads (in Kobol Club and elsewhere), Issues (at GitHub as well as Atlassian) and I think this is solved by now (on Armbian) but cannot confirm? Official install instructions (on OpenZFS website) don't really seem applicable to Armbian (kernel headers will be different, etc.). I guess what I am asking is, do I just do something like the following: $ sudo ap…