Dear all,

 

Recently I purchased Orange Pi Lite. I installed recommended Armbian with Legacy 3.4.113 kernel as there is no mainline image yet.

When pushing the power button a logo appears, the screen goes black and after 10 seconds command prompt with login appears with no dmesg output on screen while loading kernel image and services that all is already loaded but no output shown.

So far, I am happy with it, BUT when I run Vim command to open certain file, I see it opens the file and screen dimms in few seconds to complete darkness, the only way how to get out of this black screen is to switch to another console, when I switch back, it again appears and dimms to black as usual. The same problem I experience with X11.

Has anyone experiences same problem? Do you happen to know what to cause might be?

I suspect the TV does not communicate over HDMI properly and maybe the TV is going to some safe mode, but I guess it was designed for HDMI standard and so far I did not find anyone on the forum to experience at least similar problem, moreover I would somehow understand that running X11 could possibly cause some problems due to framebuffer and driver issues, but why Vim in console does the same problem?

I also think that the blank booting process is also not properly done as any Linux distribution I used, I either has some boot screen or simply shows the booting process line by line, maybe it tries to use framebuffer but fails and does not fall back printing mode without framebuffer.

Could any please give me a hint? I am going to find another TV to try it on.

 

Thank you very much

Best regards,

Ivo

Booting process is set to serial console and HDMI screen by default. Some kernels doesn't understand that and they default it to serial console ... you can force this by adding

console=display 

to /boot/armbianEnv.txt

 

Random HDMI blanking can be due to bad power supply, cables or similar.

 

Edit:

Also try forcing display mode with h3-disp utility.

Thank you for prompt reply,  I am using 5V power supply with 2.5A output, I guess this should be enough and standard HDMI cable.

I am also running Raspberry on the same TV and cable with no problems even the Orange Pi works and I can work in console, I suspected Vim and X11 probably use something I am not familiar with, anyway, I'll try to use another cable, TV and power supply.

All can be seen here:  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCofsIJz81fIkeltL4njHUhw

I already tried h3-disp before posting this, I just want to exclude a failed unit.