- connect ethernet cable
Fedora on Rock 5
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Yeah… pretty much that was the only way I got the installation going… and apparently it does works if installed on the usb itself… all it needed was ethernet cable to update the installer before running the installation…
Installation with Netgear USB realtec chip also works.
Complete installation in USB harddisk is o.k.
Only AX200 does make a problem.
If you can solve it let me know.
regards
Can you link me that netgear usb realtek chip?
I need one linux driver less wifi dongle for testings… and Havent found one. If that works it can be handy for other images as well.
Got this one working but… god damm it took forever for it to show … idk if pressing enter helped when that bug of uefi comes up.
dmesg output ,dont know the partnumber .
ADDRCONF(NETDEV_CHANGE): wlan0: link becomes ready
[ 137.332616] usb 7-1: new high-speed USB device number 2 using ehci-platform
[ 137.481847] usb 7-1: New USB device found, idVendor=0846, idProduct=9041, bcdDevice= 2.00
[ 137.481909] usb 7-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[ 137.481942] usb 7-1: Product: 802.11n WLAN Adapter
[ 137.481971] usb 7-1: Manufacturer: Realtek
[ 137.481996] usb 7-1: SerialNumber: 00e04c000001
[ 137.567618] rtl8192cu: Chip version 0x10
[ 137.687740] rtl8192cu: Board Type 0
[ 137.687962] rtl_usb: rx_max_size 15360, rx_urb_num 8, in_ep 1
[ 137.688062] rtl8192cu: Loading firmware rtlwifi/rtl8192cufw_TMSC.bin
[ 137.688506] ieee80211 phy1: Selected rate control algorithm ‘rtl_rc’
[ 137.693736] usbcore: registered new interface driver rtl8192cu
[ 137.777836] rtl8192cu: MAC auto ON okay!
[ 137.821154] rtl8192cu: Tx queue select: 0x05
[ 138.549454] rtl8192cu: MAC auto ON okay!
[ 138.599513] rtl8192cu: Tx queue select: 0x05
But vendor id and product number will help.
it is an old item. only 2,4 Mz
Some info on the AX200 problem…
Cheers, btw. Did this and was able to get both Fedora 40 and Fedora 41 (which I accidentally downloaded 
) to boot.
It is, however, unbelievably slow lmao. It looks like the CPU is doing all of the graphics rendering, which makes sense since the GPU patch was only just sent upstream for 6.10 I believe.
Back to Joshua Riek’s ubuntu for now!
@Rush – Is that Armbian 23.2.1 Jammy Gnome with panfork?
Panthor is scheduled for mainline kernel 6.10, yes.
If Radxa officially supported EDK and actively worked towards SystemReady certification there wouldn’t be a need for “does my distro work” threads because they’d just work…
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Sorry not sure what you’re asking about. If you mean what kernel am I switching back to, yes I believe Joshua’s “Linux-rockchip” is forked from Armbian’s and uses the panfork driver.
As an aside, I’ve tried to run collaboras prebuilt Debian image just to see what it’s like, since it seems they made a ***load of kernel patches for the chip using this very board, but I just couldn’t get it to boot. Not sure whether it has to do with how I’m flashing the image to the SD, or something similar to do with the bootloader/SPI but it just hasn’t worked.
Is UEFI Really necessary ?
I am currently running a heavy modified version of https://github.com/inindev/rock-5b (Debian Bookworm with Kernel 6.6.x Patched).
But it really looks like I’ll need to transition to Fedora, since Podman version 4.9.x (from Debian Testing before they introduced all this libc6 2.38+ and time64 Breaking Changes) just doesn’t cut it with Pasta Networking.
But concerning Fedora I am quite lost on how to set it up. I am currently booting and have / on SDCard EXT4 (just for increased reliability), while my main storage is on NVME with ZFS.
Thanks for your Help 
.
Hello silverstone,
for Fedora UEFI (see my message in top) is mandory, because Fedora don’t have any boot manager for this board at the moment. On my system I’ve installed the whole OS on NVME with ext4, nothing on SD-Card.
Greetings
Andreas
Hi linuxfriend,
Thank you for your quick reply 
.
I guess the UEFI part can be managed somehow.
About the sdcard not working that would be a problem because I currently have all my data on NVME (ZFS) and I don’t plan to change that. In case something goes wrong it’s so much easier to just take the sdcard off rather than opening the case and take the NVME drive out.
Worst case USB 2.0 Flashdrive for / on ext4 maybe (USB 3.0 is NOT currently supported yet) ?
USB2 and USB3 is working fine on my system. But I’m using it only for keyboard, bluetooth, scanner, and so on. External Storage on USB3 is also working.
Don’t know if USB2.0 flashdrive for / is working, give it a try.
Andreas
USB 3 is working for you 
?
According to https://gitlab.collabora.com/hardware-enablement/rockchip-3588/notes-for-rockchip-3588/-/blob/main/mainline-status.md it may in fact already be in Kernel 6.8.x. I thought it was Kernel 6.10.x. Oh well .
Is there a way to backup the existing bootloader before flashing according to https://wiki.radxa.com/Rock5/install/spi ?
Hopefully I’ll give it a try soon.
Yes, USB3 is working. I’ve attached for backups a 8 TB USB3-Disk.
Running Fedora Rawhide with kernel 6.10.0-0.rc3.32.fc41.aarch64. Why backup bootlaoder? If you don’t like to work with Fedora, you can always overwrite the SPI with the original from Radxa.
Give fedora on Rock 5 a try.
Andreas
Is there a prior version of the spi bootloader available?
After installling the last version I am not able to start the u-boot loader
from sd-card. Worked before. Any repo for previous spi-files?
I meant backup in case something were to go wrong.
But fair enough, if it gets bricked, I cannot boot to restore it anyways
On another note I might want to try using a Raspberry PI first (unrelated I know …), but it seems that the (Server) Image uses XFS Filesystem. I want EXT4 because I think it’s more reliable (NOT as ZFS of course but still …). Do you know if it’s possible to build a Custom Image with the desired Filesystem ?
I was finally getting ready to give Fedora a spin on the Rock 5B itself, but … the Tutorial https://wiki.radxa.com/Rock5/install/spi doesn’t really say anything about enabling the SPI. Looking around it looks like this is something that first needs to be enabled (rsetup ??? - I don’t even see where I can download it from) and/or some DTB needs to be compiled or enabled. Any Idea @linuxfriend ?
EDIT 1: I’m currently trying to build from Source from https://github.com/radxa-pkg/rsetup