I’m currently trying to install FreedomBox on a PINEA64+ 1GB board. I followed the instructions on the Wiki using the stable 64-bit x86 image. I followed all the steps the manual mentioned. Everything worked like it was supposed to until I tried to log into Plinth for the first time. I can’t find any evidence of the box on my home network. I checked through my router and using nmap, and I can’t see it. The lights on the LAN port aren’t lighting up. The power LED on the board itself is lit. I can’t get any output out of the box using any of the ports. Did I mess up copying the image? Or is the board fried? What can I do to diagnose the issue?
Hello, PineA64+ requires the ‘pine64-plus’ image and 64-bit x86 image will not work for it. Also we recently started building image for PineA64 and so stable images are not available for it. You need to pick testing images:
Still having issues. Now the router’s ethernet light is on when the box is connected. Also the data on the SD card looks right. I still can’t find the box on the network. Any suggestions for trouble shooting? Thank you for your help.
Update
I managed to install Debian and get that working so my hardware seems to be fine. I currently don’t have a HDMI monitor that is portable enough (I’m currently using my TV.) to get into the same room as my router so I can’t get online and try installing the package until I get a USB wifi antenna or a new monitor. If anyone has any insights as to why the image for my hardware wasn’t working. I’m all ears. Otherwise I’ll check in when I get online.
I have recently tested those Pine64+ images and have some confidence on them. Some tips for further debugging:
Don’t expect HDMI output on the FreedomBox image, it has not been tested. Just try to find it on the network and use the URL to reach it. Attempt SSH connection after initial configuration only.
Ensure that your work machine and Pine64+ board are connected to same network.
Login to the router and see if FreedomBox running on Pine64+ is trying to acquire IP address during it’s boot and use that IP address to connect to FreedomBox.
Ensure that you have waited at least 10minutes after the first boot before trying to reach the box.
Make sure you have written the image to SD card properly (and not copied it). Use the Etcher tool to be sure.
As a last resort, try to connect the Pine64+ board to a TTL serial cable and get the debug logs. This is how we debug the board when building support for it. This will clearly tell us what the problem is.
Running down the list I still can’t find the IP address for my Pine64+. It’s not showing in the router’s interface and I can’t raise it with any tools in the terminal. I waited 10 minutes. I wrote the image using dd in my terminal as noted in the manual. I can try Etcher if you think that would make a difference. I hooked it up to the serial console and as best I can tell it’s outputting random strings of unicode characters like "9�Ո��9d�DΧ�����p�J����)�!�
". It changes every boot. I’ve exhausted my free time for today, but I’ll try Etcher on Monday. If you have any ideas please let me know.
UPDATE
I double checked where I plugged the TTL cable in and sure enough it was backwards. I fixed it and now I’m getting intelligible output. Every time I boot up this is what I see:
U-Boot 2019.01+dfsg-7 (May 14 2019 - 02:07:44 +0000) Allwinner Technology
CPU: Allwinner A64 (SUN50I)
Model: Pine64+
DRAM: 1 GiB
MMC: SUNXI SD/MMC: 0
Net: eth0: ethernet@1c30000
starting USB...
USB0: 1 USB Device(s) found
scanning usb for storage devices... 0 Storage Device(s) found 1 switch to partitions #0, OK
mmc0 is current device
25186874 bytes read in 4819 ms (5 MiB/s)
Booting Debian 4.19.0-5-arm64 from mmc 0:1...
## Flattened Device Tree blob at 4fa00000`
Booting using the fdt blob at 0x4fa00000
[ 1.603531] Initramfs unpacking failed: uncompression error
[ 2.501398] sun50i-de2-bus 1000000.de2: Error couldn't map SRAM to device
Does that tell you anything? I googled around, but I can’t find anything directly relevant. I think I’ll try Etcher next.
I got it working! I was going to try Etcher but it wasn’t in my package manager so I downloaded the latest image to try one last time and it worked. Everything seems to be running fine. Thanks for the help and the patience.
@atrombone, Thanks for reporting back with the results. Your earlier log does show some issue with the image since “Initramfs unpacking failed”. Perhaps this was a transient error due to Debian packaging changes. Good to know that newer images have resolved the issue.