I just visited the Armbian website, and under Downloads there are no longer any images of Radxa SBC’s. I did a search for the Rock Pi 4 series, and it says unsupported. Not long ago there was broad support from Armbian for Radxa SBC’s. What has happened?
Has Armbian dropped support for Radxa SBC's?
Its got sod all to do with lack of contributors as anyone who has read the forums history knows.
They thought Radxa was going to pay a support agreement and they didn’t.
Igor has been trolling this for months.
If they want to remove support then that is there prerogative but many of us already know why without need for further comment
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Indeed Radxa boards have been dropped from supported list. Together with many other boards. And there are more boards that will be dropped.
The fact just is that there are not enough hands/time/money for too much work.
It is a choice between having too many boards with few having well working software. vs less boards with better software.
There are just too much growing pains.
I personally am not happy with the situation. But I can’t do anything else but accept it and hope things will improve in the future.
You can still download Armbian images for Radxa boards in the archive. And you can still build your own images.
Nobody is held back of forking the project and make their own Armbian release for Radxa. It has been done before. I don’t have the knowledge for it. And even then I wouldn’t have the time.
I still like Radxa boards. And I still review them. I’m in between both since I love wel designed arm SBCs, and I need good software to be able to use them.
Greetings.
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I can not imagine you Nico staying away from what might be the Zero2 & Rock5 as I dodged the Rock3 and already done the RockPi4, but those 2 for me are very interesting.
There will be images to go at and actually curious how the Debos build will go but do have a pref for manjaro of late but hopefully Radxa will focus on a debian & ubuntu minimal as building up for me is preferential.
Rolling and point release images all have there niches and preferences and it will be interesting to see how things go.
I payed for the Rock5 the moment I could. So I can’t wait for it to be ready. The waiting has been long for it.
I’ve also got the Zero to be reviewed in the coming weeks. Got the data, but busy with other things now.
I can 't say anything else than I love it. I can’t understand A53 cores consume so little for so much performance. And with that not a lot of heat.
I wanted it to make a gaming rig on power banks with 5V 13" 1080p hdmi display.
Not sure yet what to use. I guess vanilla Armbian or Manjaro with emulators/box86/box64.
The retropie doesn’t have HDMI sound. Haven’t checked if there’s another version somewhere else.
Only thing is the wifi doesn’t always wake up. And the amlogic blobs.
So indeed I’m not staying away from it. And running Armbian on my RockPiX too for recording music. Best sbc for that job. Super clean USB.
Yeah Rock5 might be a long term project but its a thing of beauty 
Zero format boards always intrigue me I know the RadzaZ has a G31 but with RpiZ2 its lost some of its shine but for me the RadxaZ2 is full of intrigue.
From that are you less impressed with Cortex-A73 cores perf/watts/thermal?
That has more performance per clock. But less performance per watt than a53.
I think it is more the lithography that makes a difference here. 12nm.
In performance per watt Amlogic has always been king since I use ARM.
Odroid C2 with S905 used to be my favorite for that. It ran at 1.75Ghz while not overheating and low power consumption. That was 5 years ago.
Raspberry can’t do it today.
I still need to see how RK3588 will be. Should be great, but maybe there’s another reason it took this long? I hope not.
I think again its process 8nm and what has happened Rockchip ended up at the back of the queue to some high end customers paying high end fab $ or so I am hoping
Raspberry do actually make 100% profit on there boards and they always go for ultra cheap process fab.
Z2 they did nothing really but put a Pi3 into that format and yeah you would of thought maybe they might jump from 24nm but nope.
Hence we are stuck with a toasty ram sandwich @1.4Ghz max / 512mb
To be honest I am having a bit of a pissy with raspberry as 1st I got a temp ban by saying it was stupid to get trolled by spam and make comparisons with a nvidia shield and pi and posted some links that it had been posted verbatum before as obviously spam.
Ok I used the word stupid but whilst I was having a pissy fit as wanted to ask some questions about the new Z2 I posted how stupid it is to get temp bans purely for telling admins they are being spammed.
I think that got me perma banned as there is absolutely no other reason and when I ask I get no reply unless it was for purely stating the obvious that VC6 is not in the same league as the GPU in a Shield II but hey F em
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可能已经放弃了,但无所谓,只要还有合适的Linux系统就很好,比如Debian
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They’ve been pruning older SBCs, I’ve had a couple of other boards dropped from supported.
Can you still get the old archived image ?
I can understand the logistics of supporting an ever increasing number of systems.
Maybe we need some Radxa members to join Armbian and work on maintaining older Radxa boards.
Once you are running you only need to update and upgrade the Debian packages.
We are maintaining some Radxa boards now actually, and we will release Armbian images built by ourselves.
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To be honest there is Armbian out there and often images are you not going to keep with Debos and your own images?
Main image being just a base minimal that all can build on for Ubuntu / Deb
Asking just for curiosity, why did radxa choose to maintain a separate debian release at the beginning?
你的问题好奇怪,Ubuntu基于debian,armbian也是基于debian,为什么还要费力弄其他版本呢
We are doing our best to maintain hardware support which includes testing, upgrading, keeping things operational.
Other Linux distros that operates in this field either mainly relies on us, since we are most further in arm single board computers, generic upstream kernel or old legacy stock kernel. Also before and after HW becomes commercially obsolete and vendor and upstream maintainers are long gone.
“Debian” or “Ubuntu” has little to do with this. We use their base packages, not even their user land, because you are familiar with and user land part will just work. Its changed a lot more then average “Linux based on” out there. Armbian is in user perspective polished Debian / Ubuntu. We fix some of their general bugs. Our software engineering team is also bigger and more advanced then from most vendors and most ARM distros / sections within and our focus is “the meat”. BTW we changed wallpaper in 10 years only once … but yes, we would like to do that more often - with your help, we have plenty of other work you have troubles with.
Not every Linux is the same. There are many quality levels and orientations. We don’t use general purpose Debian or Ubuntu hardware support layer. That is on average quality at best, outdated and other, mainstream kernels lacks many functions (and also additional quality checks) we are adding and keep functional. Upstream never tests obscure hardware on kernel upgrade, we do it in CI process, and even it would be tested, you need someone to fix bugs … We could do more of that for you, but almost entirely on our family budget and for the attitude of (not) understanding is just stupid. Our competition doesn’t support us, strange right? and end users also almost nothing - I know its hard to explain it to what is our value. Our work - keeping devices functional - represent annually tens of thousands of engineering hours on top of generic Linux kernel. Will you cover something you don’t know nor understand?
Radxa is interested in our work. We also are interested, but we can’t finance what you want nor expansion of the project. Neither they can. Not at the level we are / were.
Since we are failing to explain the value and problems of our work, we stop certain operations and move on to essentials for a while. When you will start helping, we will proceed.
If you need better software, your support is essential. If you want that a problem is fixed for you - you have to do something for that. Demanding of “as is support” is not an option.
One recent story from the field. When you think you saw it all, demands are just getting more bizarre. The following below came to my private comm last week from someone I never been in contact with. He is not my client and obviously don’t want to become one. He just want immediate attention to get his problem fixed. To save more, he even assumed that support is paid so he want to prevent me being paid twice already at start of a communication which never should even happen …
We need to … I believe X is already paying you for this support, so im not going to pay twice if its not needed …
something that will probably take you a few hours to do
Since I am coming from the industry and after observing the problem it was clear that those “few hours of work” represent 3-4 weeks of full time Linux engineer. Ofc this person doesn’t want to hear the reality. And just talking and educating him in private would costs 3-5 times more he is willing to pay for his bug.
Armbian is maintained by individuals and paid mainly by them. We are fixing hard problems for which insane a lot of time is needed. Some vendors helps, some play dumb, but in general their contributions can’t come close to cover project costs and individual loss. Not even close for dealing with their product / hardware. It is just lifting from plain zero.
Your part and help is essential.
Role of single board computer maintainer is a first small step - in another words - if you can’t fix hard problems, take at least some burden away. Then:
- software development assistant
-
test automation engineer
… and other roles that are needed that such project function.
We will need to raise some additional cash where again your help is essential. All this needs to be organised. Which is again something that needs time, attention and our investments. Nothing of that we need - you need better software support.
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So many words from igorp, just to say:
Then i remember Igorp bitching about fork of Armbian - TwisterOS.
Also, igorp, your post just now sounded like you just recently (i guess 2 month?) became Armbian head. I guess your first decision was to “unless we get paid don’t do anything”? No need to answer, or we will go into once again long discussion of “open source don’t get money --> open source goes to pay-2-developt, when it hits necessary reputation --> reputation goes into the shit --> different open source arrive”
I think we can draw this conv to an end as obviously some parties where upset for various reasons and needs no further provocation.
Hopefully eventually all will see eye to eye and co exist.
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