Rock5C, WiFi and Bluetooth

#1

Hi
Recently I bought a Rock5C and a Penta SATA Hat. Nice combo for a disk redundancy fans.
Installed Armbian https://dl.armbian.com/rock-5c/Bookworm_current_minimal-homeassistant, it’s kernel 6.12.17-current-rockchip64
I set it up on my favorite filesystem ZFS. Works great. I wanted to use it as HomeAssistant server.
Then I discovered I don’t have WiFi and Bluetooth. I tried then several other images/kernels with the same result.

Finally downloaded Radxa’s official OS, rock-5c_bookworm_cli_b1.output.img
Booted fine. But, what was again the username/password to log in?
The “LearnMore” button on the http://radxa.com/products/rock5/5c/#downloads site leads to a 404 Error.
Didn’t make me feel confident.
After some editing on the SD card I was in.
The system is really minimal. Nothing for an inexperienced Linux user. I would expect at least DNS working out of the box …

I don’t understand Radxa’s philosophy. You design a nice HW which could compete with Rpi5, to let people run Linux on it, but choose components not supported by mainline kernel. Then you waste resources on an own Debian interpretation. A very poor one. Why?

The WiFi driver provided somewhere on Github as pointed from this site


doesn’t compile on my system.

About the same time a bought also a Rpi5 with a PentaHat. Installed Armbian on it, everything works as expected. No head scratching, no time wasted. I know, it was double the price, but at the end I think it was worth it. Sorry.

BTW, I also have a rockpi-e which has been running Armbian for over two years now, as a WiFi access point. I almost forgot about it :wink:
Linux rockpi-e 5.15.93-rockchip64 #23.02.2 SMP PREEMPT Fri Feb 17 23:48:36 UTC 2023 aarch64 GNU/Linux
So, Radxa, you know, you can it better.

Regards,
Chris

1 Like
#2

I agree with the overall sentiment but it’s quite easy to find that the username and password on Radxa systems is radxa/radxa. Just use Google.

#3

There’s no denying that the AIC8800 is a terrible component for a linux desktop/server. Its manufacturer has not made any effort to upstream the drivers. Either you live with no WLAN/BT or you live with DKMS package.

#4

Incognito
I think you missed the point. And an excellent opportunity to say nothing :wink:

#5

nyanmisaka

I guess Radxa discovered all this about AIC8800 very late, probably from the customers feed-backs :-/
Otherwise they would consider increase board costs by $0.5 by using other available chip for the design.

I have no problem using DKMS, several components, even one so important for me, ZFS, use it.
But they give me something which simple works. The one from Fadxa I mentioned, doesn’t compile.
It’s not a problem for me to plug in WiFI/BT dongles. But I would prefer to buy a Rock-5C-very-light, without this AIC8800 thing and save time and hassles.

#6

I am not an advocate for Radxa but I understand they need to offer some kind of operating system for their business customers. For end users it’s probably not a good option. I think this is the only reason these distros exist. Would take armbian or something current over it any day