CubieBoard Forum

Wow, you are adventurous!  Or very skilled.

Hopefully someone here can help, but over on the Fedora ARM where they have lots of experience with ARM SOC with special wifi and BT that require custom kernels (this problem seems to be endemic in the arm community), they just go with a USB device.  And this is what I have done the few times I have needed this.

My Howto guides for CentOS on Cubieboards have been updated! You can get to them via:

http://www.htt-consult.com/arm.html

I recently lost a drive and had to quickly rebuild a system (fortunately not a critical use one).  It went reasonably well using my own instructions, but just was challenging to do all the select and copy work.  So I learned some CSS and Javascript and made all the text areas directly selectable/copyable.

Note the mailserver is still a work in progress.  Maybe after this distraction I will get back to it.

Enjoy!

If the UUID is the same for the rootfs on the NAND and SD, then try deleting the rootfs from the NAND.  The expectation is it will find the one on the SD.

At least change to UUID on the NAND so it is not the one in the boot instructions and should be ignored.

I use this method to have /boot on an SD and the rootfs on the HD for the CT and CB2.  Recently I have also done this for the ODROID HC1.

UUIDs seem to be the way to direct the boot to the media desired.

You seem to be the first here with a CB7, so unfortunately not much advice available.

Can you share any thing about the CB7 and why you chose it?  What have you gotten working on it?

Let us know!

The challenge is that there is no open MALI GPU code.  general GTK3 is a dog on cubieboards unless you have a Cubietech OS.  GTK2 is not so bad, but everything is moving off it to GTK3.

If Cubietech would provide the necessary pieces to the open development, things might be different.

For me, they are good servers.

Welcome Jenny,

Tell us which Cubie you have, what distro you are working with, and the intended use of the system.

thanks!

Odroid is a competitor to Cubieboards, so I avoid talking about it here.  Much.  But I like the design/features of the HC1, the only Odroid I have worked with.  I look at the HC1 to be an excellent platform for my next mailserver.  You can see about all my ARM SOC works at:

http://www.htt-consult.com/arm.html

There are links to installing CentOS7 on Cubies (2 and Truck) and a Odroid HC1 (needs the 4.19 kernel).

Also link to my work-in-progress on a replacement mailserver.  My current server is a Cubietruck running Redsleeve6 plus the standard fare of Postfix/Postfixadmin/Myaql/Dovecot/Amavis-new/Clamav/Spamassisin/Rouncubemail.  Amavis-new is a real load on a Cubietruck.  Need more processors.  But this box has been running since 5/14 (really needs the upgrade).

So I went shopping for 4 core or more with good sata, and decided on the HC1.

My replacement Samba DC (Nethsever) will be a CubieTruck.

My DNS and web servers are Cubieboard2s.

That about covers it.

Oh with the mailserver, I have to get the newer password hash (MD5 -> SHA512) and quota system along with a backup solution solved before I launch.  Probably a few weeks (got a trip to Beijing coming up getting in the way of stuff like this).

Does it boot with NO drives attached?

Not that this is a good thing, but I can see it with the uSD.  I would think it would boot with no uSD, but with sata.

It all depends on the bootloader and uboot on the NAND.

Again, I don't own one of these, so only talking based on my Cubietruck experience.

In fact, I have begun experimenting with the Odroid HC1.  Now if Cubietech had come out with something so well designed for a server platform...

Further, look here:

https://linux-sunxi.org/Mainlining_Effort

The place to ask about this is on the sunxi list.

According to people that work with uboot and current kernels, it probably will won't work to put uboot on to NAND, but it might not take much more work on uboot.

If you are capable of making contributions to uboot (I am not), then join the sunxi uboot list and work with them on what needs to be added.  Otherwise wait until I get someone else to do the work.  This may take some real time (like months).

With both Fedora and Centos, using current uboot, I only have uboot on the uSD, and all partitions on the sata drive.  As long as there are no partitions on the uSD, uboot tries elsewhere for the partitions.

I have been meaning to ask on the Fedora-arm list about putting uboot on NAND, this is the incentive to do that...

btw,  no mali drivers either for the most part.

gtk2 is ok, but gtk3 is a dog.

Fedra28 hdmi was decent.  Fedora29 is painful.

Cubietech needs to lend a hand in opening mali.

what you are up against is the sunxi uboot work has not provided vga support.  none of the distros that use it can drive vga as a result.  and there is no plan to add it.

look for an hdmi-to-vga converter.

I have not been sucessful with these an Fedora/centos.

great to hear someone is getting direct Cubietech support.

Again, the Linaro user list.  This is Linaro specific.  There are many other A10 boards out there with similar installation challenges and you will get more help there.

But please share your experiences here to help other people searching for Cubieboard help.

Sorry I can't be of more help, but I am in the Fedora/Centos camps and you will find me a regular there in their arm user lists!