Hi

I am trying to breathe some life into an older generic Amlogic TV box on my workbench and am hitting a brick wall with modern mainline images.

I’m looking for a copy of a legacy, community-archived Armbian image (Kernel 5.4.y, 5.10.y, or 4.19.y) tailored for the S905X / S905W (meson-gxl) architecture. The newer automated GitHub builds (6.12+ kernels) completely purge the old asset files, and modern multi-stage boot configurations (boot.scr) are being entirely bypassed by my box's legacy onboard bootloader.

 

Hardware Specs & Current Context:

SoC: Amlogic S905X / S905W variant (Generic budget clone box, likely 1GB RAM)

Target DTBs I'm testing: meson-gxl-s905x-p212.dtb or meson-gxl-s905w-tx3-mini.dtb

The Baseline (Crucial Detail): CoreELEC-Amlogic.arm-9.2.8-Generic boots instantly and functions flawlessly from a Class 4 MicroSD card on this box.

CoreELEC

The Problem: Modern Armbian ophub images (6.x mainline kernels) fail to engage the bootloader at power-on and skip straight to the internal,  native Android OS, even with aml_autoscript renames or script adjustments.

Because CoreELEC 9.2.8 catches immediately, I know the physical hardware, SD slot bus, and basic external boot priority work perfectly. It confirms this specific box requires a primitive build structure that still utilizes the true legacy u-boot.ext chain-loader file on the root partition and simple text configuration (uEnv.ini or early uEnv.txt configurations) which these stubborn eMMC controllers require to handshake.

CoreELEC

If anyone has a preserved .img.xz or .img.gz file sitting on a local drive or a private cloud mirror (like an old balbes150 or flippy build from 2020–2022), I would greatly appreciate a download link!

Thanks in advance for keeping the legacy hardware archive alive.

6 hours ago, jCore said:

Modern Armbian ophub images

Ophub is a fork of Armbian.  They use the Armbian name without permission.  They are not Armbian.  They do not contribute to Armbian development nor do they participate in these forums.  You need to ask questions regarding ophub in there support channels.

Second point, per the faq install instructions on this site.  It you have ever run another distribution (like coreelec), you have changed the uboot environment in ways incompatible with Armbian.  You need to flash a clean android firmware before using armbian.  (Balbes had issues with coreelec and made his code incompatible)

Ok thanks my apologies.   Oh thanks, I missed that point.  This box should've been ewaste long ago I gotbthe bright idea.of using it as a low power 'digital sign' driver for my wife's store . I started with ohub bookworm server for the board.  I couldn't get the boot toothpick to read cards or usb.  It wasn't until I flashed CoreELEC to a card and was trying to see if it was a distro issue that I realized the box was trying to  go into android recovery with the toothpick not looking for boot drives. I put aml_autoscript from the CoreELEC root folder and zipped it then I used android recovery mode to clear the cache and update from card pointing at the zip file.  Even though the final output was that it failed it actually loaded CoreELEC autoscript and when I rebooted it read the bootloader on sdcard.  After discovering that little nuance I did the same for the flashed Arabian distro but it didn't seem to catch the bootloader on sdcard.  I assumed I wasn't getting the right dtd.img copied so I tried the most likely for the chip and when I.asked ai it thought I needed a legacy version.   When I throw the CoreELEC in now it still boots from the card.  I made the assumption that the modifications to android boot would work accross  distros so it didn't seem strange that CoreELEC might boot even if it was the bookworm autoscript being used by android.   Thanks for taking the time to reply even though it's the wrong forum  and my apologies I should've thought that through.   Looking at the hub forum it didn't seem like there was much in the way of replies happening.   Cheers