Just as the title says. I have taken the current version of debian armbian from the archives, flashed this onto a micro sd card and then installed the mainline kernel packages over this. It boots to a login prompt, but after a few seconds the whole system locks up. Does anyone have any idea what coudl cause this? 

I have found a solution to this. 

 

1.) mount the SD card on some other linux box

2.) using chroot, uninstall ntp and wpa-suplicant from the SD card

3.) unmount the SD card, and reboot the orangpi using it. 

4.) once you have it booted and conencted to a wired network, do an apt-get update and then reinstall wpa-suplicant and ntp

 

You might not need to do both of these packages, but i had a gut feeling it was going to be one of them. 

You did this?

 

 

or this?

 

 

Whatever you did, I hope you made a backup before switching kernel. 

No, I did not do that

 

90% of what I do with these small arm board might break my system. I'm used to it. 

Using my own build of Mainline, I've never had to do that, but I'm always doing the first login using a USB-TTL, and then, only then, I'm configuring the WiFi network ...