My first couple of days with a Rock 5b

#1

I was quite excited to try a Rock 5b after a few years on a Pi4. The hardware specification sounds amazing, offering many additional features and performance improvements compared to the Pi4. I decided to give it a try and got the 8GB RAM version. I flashed a brand new, high-quality SD card and was ready to rock & roll.

I must say that the journey has been quite frustrating and challenging, even for the most basic tasks one would normally do on a new board. I downloaded the official Debian image, and immediately I started facing issues:

  1. The GPG key in the official image was not updated (that’s ridicolous). Searching for the correct one, I got diverted to the forum user’s solutions, which led to other problems until I finally ended up in the right place: http://apt.radxa.com. One issue resolved!
  2. I installed the VNC server as per https://wiki.radxa.com/Rock/vnc. Everything seemed fine, but the locale settings were not set, nor were they proposed to be set when I installed the image. As a result, VNC didn’t work. After hours of searching for the issue, I finally got it working. Another one off the list!
  3. Time to update the system. After the update, the desktop environment broke. The login screen entered a loop and wouldn’t load. It just kept asking for the user and password. I tried using Ctrl+Alt+F3 to access a terminal, and although I could log in there, I couldn’t solve the login loop. Reinstalling KDE didn’t help either. I had to start all over. However, even with a new fresh official Debian image, the login loop issue is not resolved. Still same issue.

While the hardware looks great, there seems to be quite a bit of improvisation in managing the OS updates and reliability. I’m not really sure what to do with this Rock 5b board. As I mentioned earlier, it looks nice, but it’s been quite a mess!

Update: The login loop is caused by the VNC settings not by the apt update. Looking into a solution for this.

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#2

welcome to the rock 5b world… same problems to me, no video ouytput after upgrading ubuntu to 22.04 and fix GPG key.

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#3

Use Armbian, your troubles will be gone. I wish first party systems were better but they are a bit behind.

Please ban JonGroff
#7

@hideki1 is another troll account to ban @RadxaYuntian. I have my opinions about what system to use but have nothing against radxa as a company.

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#8

I want to clarify that I never stated that the hardware of the Rock 5 is flawed. On the contrary, I believe that the hardware is of good quality. However, it’s frustrating to encounter issues such as GPG keys, VNC server problems, and local settings right out of the box. I believe these common features should have been fixed in the official downloads to avoid users having to sort them out even before powering up the device.

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#10

You are right. We are going to release a new image to solve all these issues.

3 Likes
#11

@jack
Thanks for acknowledging the issues. We looking forward to an update Debian img.
While you look into that, please also notice that there is an issue with theVNC settings as proposed in your Wiki. This is the one causing the login loop. Stopping the VNC server cause the login loop issue to disappear. I do not have yet a solution for this issue.