How to boot the desktop version?

#1

I have tried dozen times to boot the board, but most of them are failed.
I want to know if anything is wrong…
The os image includes Twister os, Manjaro minimal, Manjaro Gnome and Debian are download from radxa’s wiki page.

These are the following steps:

  • Use windows 10 as host, plug the board, boot with USB mode, flash the rz-fastboot-loader.bin or android-bootloader.img in emmc
  • power off, then boot with USB mode again.
    flash rz-udisk-loader.bin in emmc
    sometimes it success, the new UDisk drive show up.
    if it failed, return to the first step and try again…
  • use raspberry pi imager to flash image in the drive.

Only Debian and Manjaro minimal boot success. But Debian does not have wifi. Manjaro minimal show up the console and I didn’t know how to make it boot in desktop (no startx in there…). Others remain black screen.

I have try to boot the os in SDCard, Twister os, Manjaro minimal and Manjaro Gnome remain black screen. Debian success. I found there is another unofficial armbian image and flash it into SDCard. It can boot, but the system cannot found the wifi. So I cannot install the desktop package.

#2

Hi, I tried “Radxa Ubuntu” and “Armbian Ubuntu”, both worked out of the box, it’s more a thing of practice, you need to figure out and relearn the process for every new setup you are getting into. (at least for me) I would try to go through every step of the installation process as described in the official documentation and check if you can get the the same output as it is expected in the documentation. I honestly looked through 3 different documentations and I tried all of them. A good documentation can be very handy when you need to replicate the results. (I wrongfully whiped the SSD of my Ubuntu Laptop and lost all my documentation) Generally speaking it is normal that setting up a SBC is not the same as making an order at AMZ or getting an Uber. You get the point.

Generally I can testify that Ubuntu, both Armbian and the official Radxa Image are working just fine.

I didn’t expected the wifi to work (generally low expectations after using rpi’s and tv boxes) I actually planned to use the eth-over-usb, but surprisingly, this SBCs have a very decent wifi connection, I didn’t tested the speed, but I can assure you that it’s for sure good enough to download packages. (It would be interesting to test the speed)

@fenix_lam try the Ubuntu Image (minimal and install a lightweight GUI), I hope that Ubuntu fits your needs.

Best Regards