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Posted at 5/13/2018 13:13:32
Only Author
14#
Sounds like you experienced the same issue as I did. I have a 2GB version (would have purchased the 4GB but FireFly's website wouldn't let me create an account at the time).
Although I'm very impressed with the build quality of the RK3399 I was extremely disappointed in the product when I first plugged it in and followed the Quick Start > Starter Guide which pretty much turned the unit into a brick.
It booted Android (which I have absolutely no interest in) and when I followed the Starter Guide > "How To Switch To Ubuntu from Android" brought up a black screen and repeated reboots always booted to a black screen.
Either Quality Control at FireFly screwed up, or that web page is way out of date.
Currently I would not recommend the RK3399 to anyone. It's too bad, because I think they could sell a lot of them if they can get their website and support together.
A lot of the files on their Downloads section are probably hosted on a Raspberry Pi in someones basement in the out extremities of China as they're so painfully slow to download. No idea why they don't use a CDN to the rest of the world.
I did eventually manage to install linux. The web page for Quick Start > Flash Image is either very out of date or just plain wrong.
I used a version of upgrade_tool. There are 2 versions in the downloads section as I recall, named totally different things, one is called 'Linux_Upgrade_Tool_v1.24.zip" and the other is "upgrade_tool_v1_26.tar.gz". And some Chinese writing on the page. WTF?
After finding the "Recovery | Reset | Recovery" button sequence, I untarred upgrade_tool_v1_26.tar.gz and tried following the web page directions. Nothing - the instructions do not work.
I saw a log file and something about config.ini missing "Error:stat config.ini failed,err=2" - but there wasn't any config file in the tar file.
So I extracted the older version of the tool, which included a Chinese manual and guess what, a config.ini file. I don't recall if I bothered to try running the older version. I might have done following FireFly's badly written instructions. Anyway, in perusing the pdf I noticed that the program could be run in 'interactive' mode - i.e, not via the bash command line, but by typing ./upgrade_tool instead.
I copied the config.ini file, now the program saw the Fly and I selected it (1 I seem to recall). I was then able to upload the image file I found via one of the various links "Firefly-RK3399-ubuntu16.04-20180416112819.img" - I believe I just had to type 'uf' at that point and the upload began.
Part of this whole problem is that FireFly are just using RockChip programs and documents and don't have a clear path to follow. On top of that there's bound to be modified versions.
I Intend to see if I can use the Fly as a server. So I ran some general speed tests.
eMMC - 40 MB/s
FD card - 18 MB/s
Western Digital "My Passport" Hard Disk via USB-3 port - 110 MB/s
Samsung T5 Portable SSD via USB-3 - 350 MB/s
While that Samsung is slower than the 450 MB/s I average on my Mac's, a 9x speedup over the eMMC is worth investigating.
Luckily it's possible to install the rootfs (linux) on an external USB device (actually on the RockChip site claims you can run the boot (kernel) and the rootfs via a USB device.
I found some tools to unpack the image I mentioned above, but either they're too old or from some other source because I can't modify the 'parameters' file to use /dev/sdaX as the root partition. The program just craps out.
At some point, I'll post cleaner instructions because I've seen several comments from users saying they can't get their Fly booting Linux.
On the off-chance anyone from FireFly management reads this post - hey a suggestion, spend a little time and money on creating some up to date web pages for English speakers and rent a CDN to distribute large files to the rest of the world.
As I said earlier, I'm very impressed with the build quality of my RK3399, it's just too bad that the support is crap for English speakers to even get their machines working. FireFly could sell a *lot* of these units if they spend the time on good setup and support. |
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