I am a former Dietpi singer of praises (aka as Igor calls us evangelists[not anymore] will now refer to it as the other distro or dp I suppose)...until they kyboshed the armbian based dp images for the orange pi series of SBC's...since then...have attempted to go back and forth with varying success (mostly failures)

 

Going to bite the bullet and go full armbian...been battling getting good wifi connectivity (using my Orange Pi Lite boards as octoprint servers for my 3D printers)

 

After building my own hybrid armbian/dp crossbreed distro for Orange Pi Lite and getting it successfully upgraded to their V6.9 well...it started flipping out, so gonna come back to a pure armbian install, after going back and forth...digging thru scripting saw that that other distro disabled the 8189fs driver in /etc/modules, then thru scripting modprobed cfs80122 driver, then did a call for wpa_supplicant with driver option -D nl80211,wext
Complete command string from ps -ef shows

/sbin/wpa-supplicant -s -B -P /run/wpa-supplicant.wlan.pid -i wlan0 -D nl80211,wext -c /etc/wpa-supplicant/wpa-supplicant.conf

 

After further digging, found this interesting walkthru on instructables so I am posting here

 

Perhaps this is a solution...not the best...but it get's wifi working, and I would bet nowhere near full  bandwith thru the wifi, but it is up and talking

 

Just thought I would share if people are also having issues

 

 

 

# cat /etc/network/interfaces
auto lo
auto wlan0
iface lo inet loopback
iface wlan0 inet static
address 192.168.0.5
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.0.1
dns-nameservers 192.168.0.1 8.8.8.8
pre-up sudo /sbin/wpa_supplicant -iwlan0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf -Dnl80211,wext -B
pre-up sleep 5
post-down sudo killall -q wpa_supplicant

worked like a champ...came up first try...I did have to add the dns-nameservers...otherwise no ping...

 

Since there is no physical eth0, no need for the entry

 

What are you running here? Jessie or Xenial? (armbianmonitor -u is always handy to see) Network manager is pretty buggy in Jessie, while on Xenial it somehow works. Stretch is better, but for that, a modern kernel is a must. I don't recall issues but I will check.

per my .img file I burned  Armbian_5.38_Orangepilite_Debian_stretch_next_4.14.14

 

Since it's working 100%, multiple reboots and even moved from one OPiLite to another and it comes up...made the entire thing static

did a # chmod 400 on the /etc/network/interfaces file to prevent it being overwritten by a script

 

It's a pain trying to type on one of those tiny kidney bean wireless keyboards

 

Yeah it's a brute force, in no way clean...but so far it's 100% reliable on the wireless connection, it comes up every time...it's ugly...but it works