I’m not going to win any awards for dremel skills, but it works 
I also had to flatten some strengthening ribs on the plastic lower-cover, but that wasn’t much effort.
Introduce the Radxa Zero
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Just made an account to hop in this thread and say I just preordered a 2g model from Allnet! I’m loving what I’m seeing so far with this project; it’s looking very promising, and seems like it’ll be able to help me solve all the issues I’ve had with the raspi0 and bpim2z in regards to building a handheld with some good performance/battery life ratio.
Would be happy to accept an early build for demoing purposes haha! I’ll just have to keep patient for the preorder to be fulfilled I guess!
Keep up the good work guys!
It looks nice, the finish is good. I like the metal feeling.
Anyone know if you can put 5v direct to GPIO on the zero so you keep the USB3.0 spare?
I’ve been testing with the board powered from a UART cable. I can’t speak for running a desktop distro with higher demands, but for something lightweight like LE it seems to be okay.
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I thought I would just check as thought it should.
Cool as because PD can operate at above 5v a simple type-c splitter cable seems a rare thing indeed and was thinking just use gpio so the usb is free for a 4k webcam.
Guess I could solder up a splitter cable as presume the boards locks 5v but being lazy GPIO is easy.
@jack Are you guys going to provide a power/usb splitter for the zero?
I also got one of these just to have but a tad expensive considering the zero price.
USB3 is host only and USB2 is power + otg(we use it as device mode most of the time). If you want to split, it should be the USB2 port.
I had presumed it was the other way round so that the OTG gets 900ma of USB 3.0 rated?
I hadn’t checked doh 
https://wiki.radxa.com/Zero/hardware/zero
Ordered one of these from amazon for testing on the Zero USB2 OTG port, USB-C female port supports 5V/2A:
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Hello is it the version from manjaro-arm github?
I managed to boot it from SD, if anyone ineterested there’s the closed issue on github about that.
But how do i get gpu working? glxinfo | grep “OpenGL” returns OpenGL renderer string: llvmpipe (LLVM 12.0.1, 128 bits).
I know that one change 01-panfrost.conf accel from ‘none’ to glamour’.
Maybe tell me how you booted from sd without emmc?
/etc/X11/ … you will find it
With XCFE there is another tweak you have to do as that starts in a funny video mode and cripples perf.
I fixed it when testing armbian as its just a 2 liner that prob has to run at startup but like a dummy never bookmarked the link.
xfwm4 --vblank=xpresent --replace , then xfconf-query -c xfwm4 -p /general/vblank_mode -t string -s "xpresent" --create
Here’s the github issue where i managed to boot from SD: https://github.com/manjaro-arm/radxa-zero-images/issues/2;
Basically you add an uboot (provided by manjaro-arm maintainer on github) to your /dev/sda (or whatever your SD is) using DD. It starts to boot but fails, you either press F1 or push arrow keys to get to the console, you’d see that it’s unable to find PARTTUUID, but you can get it by running BLKID from that console, than you should change PARTUUIDs in 2 places, one is /BOOT_MNJRO/extlinux/extlinux.conf file and second one is /ROOT_MNJRO/etc/fstab (i hope fstab is there and i’m not mistaken)))
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Hmmm, i can’t find 01-panfrost.conf at /etc/X11/
Cool will have look as spent so much time trying killed the relatively flimsy and awkward usb-boot button on the Zero (just peeled off).
Still have the 512mb version also so will have a look.
Manjaro to me seemed approx 10% faster than armbian with the ‘oibas’ graphics drivers from mem 280+ vs 250+ with glmark2
https://github.com/manjaro-arm/radxa-zero-images/releases/tag/20210830
It was there or X11/X11.d/ or something
maybe turned up as I was confused as tried mesa-git install for it to fail with llvm also then found the setting.
Went back to the normal mesa and perf and mali drivers worked the same.
Oh, yeah, it’s at /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/
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Edit and reboot glmark2 is a good a test as any with a desktop
It seems to work, i get renderer other than llvmpipe, but where do i put those lines for XFCE?
Just run them in a console I presume as root likely some sort of init is needed or added to X11 service.
Prob in user profile for X11 might be a start? Or even just in .profile?
Its just XFCE Lubuntu & others don’t seem to have the same problem.
The manjaro guys will likely you tell you.
If run as root I think its that login/boot session and not just console session but I never did check as was just interested in the glmark2 & glmark2-es2 benches.
Also kernel and stuff are going to be extra extra bleeding edge as sudo pacman-mirrors --api --set-branch is currently unstable as thats the unstable of a rolling release.
Prob check how it goes on different desktops Mate seemed no probs with no tweaks needed apart from glamour
https://github.com/manjaro-arm/radxa-zero-images/releases/download/20210830/Manjaro-ARM-kde-plasma-radxa-zero-20210830.img.xz is a fave of mine and seems pretty mainstream on manjaro.
Mate seems to be too resource heavy. I’m thinking about trying to install LXQT, it should get much more free ram, as on 1 gb even opening just 1 tab in the browser gives 400 mb of swap usage.
Prob I ran mate on the 2gb but the browser will likely be what the browser loads with little diff to desktop.
Zram is always useful for low ram SBC as less writes also.
I still failed to get my 512mb to boot? Nothing on the console at all part from the initial block search from the soc.
Did you do any glmark2/glmark2-es2 benches?
I think its great people have provided desktops for these but for me its a matter of customising a minilmal image for a custom device at this level with say magicmirror, motioneye or maybe retroarch or kodi.
I only installed a desktop out of curiosity to glmark2.
lzo-rle is great for swap and zstd is great for txt compression which I mention as its a good idea to mount a small partition @ /var/log