[OS] Debian Jessie

by **meveric** » Tue Nov 24, 2015 5:38 am

I was asked to create a minimal Debian image, which would allow users to create their own image with the software they want and need, while still having the option to install everything I offer in my repository.

So here's a very minimal Debian Jessie image for the ODROID C1 series.

It's just a headless server image only with user root at the moment. But it has all my repositories included, which allows for easy installation and updates of packages such as Kernel and Headers, or Kodi, or Chromium Browser, or whatever.

The image has my usual setup: means on first boot it's resizing the rootfs partition and configures SSH. It will automatically reboot after the initial setup after which this image is ready to use.
Kernel and headers are already installed if you need to build your own drivers.
A few basic tools such as ntp, htop, mc, vim, wireless-tools, wpasupplicant, setup-odroid and bash-completion are already installed for your convenience.

Download: http://oph.mdrjr.net/meveric/images/Jes ... -C1.img.xz
Size compressed: 102MB
Size uncompressed: 530 MB

Default Login: root
Default Password: odroid

It's ready to be used as a server image.

First things first:
Since there's constantly new development for this image and ODROIDs in general the First thing you should do after the image is up and running is to install all updates:

Code: Select all: apt-get update && apt-get upgrade && apt-get dist-upgrade

How to convert the image into a Desktop image:

The image can easily converted into a full Desktop image looking similar to this:

You can use the preinstalled tool "setup-odroid" to install a Desktop and setup a user for it, or if you want to do it manually you can use the following steps:

update the package lists (if you haven't done yet)

Code: Select all: apt-get update

run tasksel to choose your preferred Desktop environment
please note: not all Desktop Environments are working perfectly on the ODROID, best choises probably are LXDE, and MATE, but XFCE and KDE should works as well.

Code: Select all: tasksel

tasksel will take quite some time to download and install all the packages needed for a Desktop image and needs at least 1GB of extra disk space (better 2GB)
afterwards we need to install X11 framebuffer drivers and Mali GPU drivers for 3D acceleration:

Code: Select all: apt-get install xf86-video-mali-odroid libump-odroid mali450-odroid

you also need a fitting xorg.conf for the framebuffer drivers:

Code: Select all: cd /etc/X11 wget http://oph.mdrjr.net/meveric/other/C1/xorg.conf

If you are a more experienced user instead of tasksel you can always install the packages you want manually and therefore keep the image as slim as you want.

It's also recommended to create a new user account for the Desktop environment and NOT to logon as root.
For example:

Code: Select all: adduser odroid

After a reboot you should see a graphical login for your Debian Jessie image.

Once you have a Desktop running you can easily install all the packages available in my repository such as XBMC or Kodi

Code: Select all: apt-get install xbmc-odroid # or apt-get install kodi-odroid # install firmware required for hardware decoding in XBMC/Kodi apt-get install aml-libs-odroid # you also need to make amcodec devices available for Kodi # you may want to add this line to /etc/rc.local chmod 666 /dev/am*

or Chromium Browser

Code: Select all: apt-get install chromium-browser-odroid

TVHeadend for live TV in Kodi

Code: Select all: apt-get install tvheadend

or arduino for development on arduino boards, ODROID SHOW, and other electronics platforms

Code: Select all: apt-get install arduino

I also advice you to install ffmpeg from Debian repository, it's a very good tool to watch and convert videos and well maintained from experienced Debian developers.
Checkout the HOWTO link in my signature to find more packages available in my repository

Please note:
Most of the packages available in my repository are X11 based, for example the malit628-odroid package are X11 GPU drivers, or Kodi, is only available for X11, so you need a Desktop environment to use them.
Also, I haven't installed all drivers and firmwares available. If you want to use Wifi Model 4 you might have to install the firmware-ralink package first available on standard Debian repository.

The Image is set to 720p resolution as default, which can be changed in /boot/boot.ini
I also deactived vpu in boot.ini to preserv extra memory for the server image. If you want to use Kodi, you need to reactivate vpu support.

If you find any bugs please let me know.
Have fun

by **kingdev1958** » Tue Nov 24, 2015 6:56 am

You've just give me c1+ a new lease of life, you, sir, are a star!

by **meveric** » Tue Nov 24, 2015 7:01 am

you're welcome

by **csete** » Tue Nov 24, 2015 9:51 am

It works great, just like your Debian Jessie image for the XU4. Thanks!

by **rpnid** » Tue Nov 24, 2015 9:22 pm

Seen it last night right before "planned bedtime", got and flashed it, and... ouch, looks like THAT new SanDisk 32GB SD is bad

Tried again today with an eMMC...

... and yesss, first impression is quite nice. Thanks!

by **rpnid** » Wed Nov 25, 2015 1:14 am

... and even at 2nd sight: This IS a truly good one!

No bullshit found, and even things like tzdata are preconfigured the way it should IMO be done all the time =;)

Of course, eg. the 'action 17' nagging in the logs is there... but this is a standard Debian thingo, and typically fixed along with reconfiguring to personal likings. Read: Maybe one should comment that /dev/xconsole section in rsyslogd.conf for such an image... maybe not.

Personally, I'd also include sudo right away. But that's more a matter of local likings/customs/policies, and clearly neither needed in a "minimal" environment, nor any hassle to add if wanted.

So for now: I'm now trying to remember how long it's been since the last time I practically found nothing to complain or at least "internally dislike"...

cheers,
Ralf

by **meveric** » Wed Nov 25, 2015 1:33 am

That was the intend: minimalist and clean, so everyone can change it to what they want it to be

But also with a large library of software available for ODROIDs.
Glad you like it.

by **RedLineTrain** » Mon Nov 30, 2015 7:08 am

The initial boot hangs for me. Attached is the point where it hangs.

Intending to boot from an SD card -- do not have an eMMC module.

by **meveric** » Mon Nov 30, 2015 7:18 am

it complains about read/write errors on the SD card.
How did you flash the image?
What kind of SD card are you using?
Did you try changing the settings in the boot.ini for UHS mode?

by **RedLineTrain** » Mon Nov 30, 2015 7:40 am

Thanks. Based on your post, I edited boot.ini, I commented the disable UHS line. Hangs at the same place.

I am using a PNY 16GB Class 10 UHS-1 card.

Flashed using Win32DiskImager.

by **meveric** » Mon Nov 30, 2015 2:55 pm

did you hit the verify button after flashing the image?
did you unmount the SD card before unplugging?
Do you have a different SD card you could try? Maybe even from a different brand?
Sometimes SD cards report they are done, while they haven't written all data yet (some data is still in cache and not on disk yet), try to wait a minute or two after flashing to make sure all data is written to the SD card.
Please try reflashing the SD card and report back.

by **lameradze** » Thu Dec 03, 2015 7:06 pm

Same issue here. I flashed SD twice and got same outcome both times. If you wait long enough it'll start printing something like:
71.04... hdmitx: system: irq: 2
71.14... hdmitx: system: irq: 1
2124.17... hdmitx: system: irq: 2
2124.37... hdmitx: system: irq: 1

by **meveric** » Thu Dec 03, 2015 10:22 pm

I'm not really sure what "issue" you are referring to, cause "output messages" are nothing I consider an "issue", but whatever your issue is; since this seems to come from the Kernel it should have nothing to do with what image you're using.
You'll face the same issue on all images, since they all use nearly identical Kernels.

Once again, since I don't know what the issue is, I can't really tell you how to fix it or what to look out for.
Probably some issues with the HDMI output or so, which normally means you have to alter the boot.ini file accordingly to your TVs capabilities.

by **Fourdee** » Fri Dec 04, 2015 3:17 am

These images are awesome, great work! They put the Ubuntu images to shame.

DietPi for Odroid is now based on the excellent Debian Jessie images from Merveric:
http://dietpi.com

by **meveric** » Fri Dec 04, 2015 3:49 am

Thanks for the update, was waiting on that.
Gonna try your image new DietPi images

by **lameradze** » Mon Dec 07, 2015 5:55 pm

meveric wrote:I'm not really sure what "issue" you are referring to, cause "output messages" are nothing I consider an "issue", but whatever your issue is; since this seems to come from the Kernel it should have nothing to do with what image you're using.
You'll face the same issue on all images, since they all use nearly identical Kernels.

I love people making assumption not having enough info (Hardkernel's ubuntu works as well as odrobian using same sdcard), but pardon me for not providing enough info. The issue I was referring to is the one that was reported by RedLineTrain:

RedLineTrain wrote:The initial boot hangs for me. Attached is the point where it hangs.

Intending to boot from an SD card -- do not have an eMMC module.

meveric wrote:Once again, since I don't know what the issue is, I can't really tell you how to fix it or what to look out for.
Probably some issues with the HDMI output or so, which normally means you have to alter the boot.ini file accordingly to your TVs capabilities.

Thanks, but I gave up on this and switched to a more "userfriendly" image with accurate description

by **meveric** » Mon Dec 07, 2015 6:57 pm

lameradze wrote:I love people making assumption not having enough info (Hardkernel's ubuntu works as well as odrobian using same sdcard), but pardon me for not providing enough info.

I love people making incomplete bug reports but expect people to know what they are talking about and then complain if people try to guess what they are talking about

Anyway. Have fun with your image.

by **odroid** » Mon Dec 07, 2015 7:59 pm

It is worth to try to reduce the SD clock speed for reducing the maximum clock of SD card if you have the SD card stability issue.
Add this to the end of boot.ini, just before the bootm command:

Code: Select all: fdt set /sdhc/sd f_max <40000000>

by **meveric** » Mon Dec 07, 2015 8:31 pm

do you know any SD card brands that is causing this?

Maybe an additional boot parameter in the boot.ini could help if this happens for too many brands.

Except from overall speed, will this affect other cards in any way if this option would be activated as a "standard"?

by **odroid** » Mon Dec 07, 2015 9:17 pm

I have no idea because the same brand & model name make a different result when the lot/batch number is slightly different.
The normal SD clock speed is ~50Mhz and the fdt line locks it at ~40Mhz which could make a better stability obviously.
My old 32GB Samsung Class-10 SD card also had a similar issue and I can live it with my RuneAudio system over a month stably once I added the line in the boot.ini.
In fact, I just found a hint from this thread.

viewtopic.php?f=115&t=8642#p80607

by **meveric** » Mon Dec 07, 2015 9:59 pm

odroid wrote:In fact, I just found a hint from this thread.
viewtopic.php?f=115&t=8642#p80607

Ah, that's probably an issue for me, since I neither read the Hardware nor the Android sections in the forums

But thanks for the info! I never had any issues with the SD cards that I use (different SanDisk and Transcent models).
But I'll try and add a fix for the boot.ini.
Thanks again for the info

by **Pienoet** » Sat Dec 19, 2015 5:51 am

Hi meveric,

If i install kodi on this inage will there be tearing like openelec image from wrxtasy on the c1+.

by **meveric** » Sat Dec 19, 2015 6:55 am

No clue, I don't use the C1 to watch movies.
Go ahead and try yourself if you already installed it.
I provide packages for all ODROIDs not only the C1. I make sure they run everywhere and not on one specific ODROID only.
So while Kodi is generally working fine on all ODROIDs I can not guarantee it works perfectly on the C1.
But it's probably as good as it gets, since most of the issues are only related to Kernel and Drivers available for the C1 and not the Kodi package.

by **Pienoet** » Sat Dec 19, 2015 8:08 am

meveric wrote:No clue, I don't use the C1 to watch movies.
Go ahead and try yourself if you already installed it.
I provide packages for all ODROIDs not only the C1. I make sure they run everywhere and not on one specific ODROID only.
So while Kodi is generally working fine on all ODROIDs I can not guarantee it works perfectly on the C1.
But it's probably as good as it gets, since most of the issues are only related to Kernel and Drivers available for the C1 and not the Kodi package.

Ok thanks for the info!

I will try then.

by **Panderine** » Mon Jan 18, 2016 11:28 pm

this jessie image works fine on C1 and Kodi 15.2 for movies. No tearing on the gui as well. I'm using X11.

by **meveric** » Mon Jan 18, 2016 11:44 pm

Thanks for the feedback.
Do you experience any audio delays?
Especially in Kodi, Menu or while watching movies.

by **kvetter** » Wed Jan 20, 2016 11:02 am

Thank you for Debian-Jessie-1.0~RC1-20151123-C1 image

At "tasksel" I chose xfce. . .
After restarting into X the rendering was so slow it would take 15-20 seconds just to drag an active window across the screen.
Unable to get the task-bar volume control to work as well.

Re-flashed SD card and started over. At "tasksel" I chose Mate.

after useradd I checked to see if the zram was enabled, it's wasn’t.
After about 5 hours I found Logical 2GB RAM on Ubuntu for ODROID C1/C1+ http://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?f=112&t=18226 ZRAM was up and running in about 5 minutes. This post needs to be stickie or retitled something like "zram" Something that will pop for a key word search.

boot.ini nu-commented setenv 1080p
Installed ffmpeg

youtube video in browser is jerky. Kodi live basketball feed is unwatchable (weird eye strain from jerking). Recorded basketball feed was a lot better, about like Youtube video.
Any suggestions to improve video?
NOTE: it's not hardware. I have openELEC kodi on a 8GB SD card. A eMMC 8GB Pre-installed Xubuntu 14.04 and I do not have the jerky video feed on either.

apt-get install aml-libs-odroid . . . done

# you also need to make amcodec devices available for Kodi

?? I have no idea of how to make amcodec devices available for Kodi and have not been able to find anything online. If someone can explain I will appreciate it very much.

Again Thank you
Ken

by **meveric** » Wed Jan 20, 2016 4:08 pm

kvetter wrote:after useradd I checked to see if the zram was enabled, it's wasn’t.
After about 5 hours I found Logical 2GB RAM on Ubuntu for ODROID C1/C1+ http://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?f=112&t=18226 ZRAM was up and running in about 5 minutes. This post needs to be stickie or retitled something like "zram" Something that will pop for a key word search.

Neither needs it to be sticky nor should you actually use it.
A simple

Code: Select all: apt-get install zram-odroid

would have been enough, or simply asking for it.
The package you downloaded from XeoSal will work, but is against all suggestions of Linux community.
Upon testing you will notice that your system will slow down more and more and will constantly use high cpu load. That package shouldn't be used at all.
It's just made to show off "Logical 2GB RAM" and has no real value. You could easily create settings with Logical 20GB 40GB or even 68GB of RAM, that doesn't mean it makes sense

During testing with this excessive 2GB ZRAM settings it was easy to slow down the system to a crawl. In the end even moving the mouse was already laggy, the 4 CPU cores were constantly at 80~90% CPU but it was still claiming I had another 500MB of free SWAP / ZRAM.

kvetter wrote:boot.ini nu-commented setenv 1080p
Installed ffmpeg

youtube video in browser is jerky. Kodi live basketball feed is unwatchable (weird eye strain from jerking). Recorded basketball feed was a lot better, about like Youtube video.
Any suggestions to improve video?

If you use Chromium as a webbrowser, you should make sure hardware acceleration is activated. Check that Chromium is started with:

Code: Select all: --use-gl=egl --ignore-gpu-blacklist --disable-accelerated-2d-canvas --num-raster-threads=2

That you're actually using hardware acceleration.
You can check if you have hardware acceleration activated, when you type "chrome://gpu" in the address bar of your browser.
Another way to improve video quality/speed on youtube is to use FLASH instead of HTML5.
Install the pepperflash-odroid package

Code: Select all: apt-get install pepperflash-odroid

and make sure you use the "Disable HTML5 youtube video" plugin for Chromium.
But in the end you are still limited with the CPU speed the C1 has to offer. So I wouldn't expect to get 1080p videos to work.
Better video performance can only be achieved through using Kodi which also has a youtube plugin.

kvetter wrote:
# you also need to make amcodec devices available for Kodi
?? I have no idea of how to make amcodec devices available for Kodi and have not been able to find anything online. If someone can explain I will appreciate it very much.

Again Thank you
Ken

You should have kept reading two more lines:

Code: Select all: # you also need to make amcodec devices available for Kodi # you may want to add this line to /etc/rc.local chmod 666 /dev/am*

chmod 666 /dev/am*
if you check under /dev/ you will find a lot of devices starting with "am". which are for the video devices needed to use amlogic video decoder. These devices come with a permission so that "normal users" are not allowed to access them. That's why you need to change the permissions of these devices to make them accessable for all users.
Since you have to do this on each boot, it's best to put the command in the /etc/rc.local file BEFORE the exit 0 that way on each boot the correct permissions will be set.

by **XeoSal** » Wed Jan 20, 2016 11:14 pm

meveric wrote:The package you downloaded from XeoSal will work, but is against all suggestions of Linux community.
Upon testing you will notice that your system will slow down more and more and will constantly use high cpu load. That package shouldn't be used at all.

Yes @kvetter my package shouldn't be used at all, you should've used @meveric magical package, his stuff are always better that anything else he's simply better than everyone else in every field.

You also should never ask anybody else other than @meveric for help, you simply can't make use of someone else experience, are you serious please don't compare him to me.

meveric wrote:It's just made to show off "Logical 2GB RAM" and has no real value. You could easily create settings with Logical 20GB 40GB or even 68GB of RAM, that doesn't mean it makes sense
During testing with this excessive 2GB ZRAM settings it was easy to slow down the system to a crawl. In the end even moving the mouse was already laggy

First, you shouldn't compress more than the double amount of current real dedicated RAM, for god sake where are you going to compress the 68GB amount of RAM into this small memory space, giving these astronomical numbers of non-logical amount was a stupid idea to prove your point. Second, it's been beneficial for thousands of ODROBIAN users and it prevented memory freezes and it will work as a logical 2GB RAM, I got feedback of people expressing how nice it is. You should stop sanctificating yourself, this is a feasible solution for ODROID C1 that you refused to show in the past, because you hate the device, when I came and introduced it to people you tried to criticize it to make yourself feel better about what you have said before.

When we discussed the solution of RAM issues on ODROID C1 on my ODROBIAN thread, you criticized the storage swap space of ram like you had no clue about that ZRAM exists, your argument was wearing the poor SD card, when I declared that ZRAM will be integrated to my distro you started showing people that actually ZRAM is a workaround for these issues in some posts of yours I saw while you didn't tell anything about it before as a suggestion to anyone, you also produced your own ZRAM package since then.

meveric wrote:the 4 CPU cores were constantly at 80~90% CPU but it was still claiming I had another 500MB

Another non-sense point, ZRAM will only be used when it's required, if you don't reach that amount of RAM used it won't compress anything meaning no CPU usage, having a backup memory for your multitasking needs that will prevent your device from freezing and acting as a logical 2GB ram is a big plus and advantage, you are misleading the users by telling them it shouldn't be used.

Here's my understanding of ZRAM working with my package according to my experience:

XeoSal wrote:Yeah, you can play around with the amount if you change values related to the formula, the simplest way if you want no hassle would be just changing the fraction:

Code: Select all
FRACTION=240 (reducing this value will result in reducing the size of each swap block device as well)

Fraction is a part of this formula:

Code: Select all
SIZE=$(( MEMORY * FRACTION / 100 / CPUS ))

Generally, the kernel will not start swapping/compressing into the ram until it's actually needed, which is very nice for keeping the CPU at its highest performance rate unless you need to take some power from it for your memory needs. Apparently, in my experience, if you keep memory used always higher than 1GB, the zRAM module will keep about 100 ~ 200MB amount of dedicated memory at least already free in case of ODROID C1 (meaning it started compressing the current data stored in memory blocks preventing further size increasing), but when you reach about 1.8GB of swap memory usage then free dedicated memory will start slowly to vanish completely.

The number of zRAM memory block devices is generated automatically according to the number of cores you have in your CPU, meaning each block device is handled by a single core, as a result of this code:

Code: Select all
CPUS=`grep -c processor /proc/cpuinfo` (this command will return value as "4" which is number of cores on ODROID C1)

The total amount of real memory included in the previous formula is determined by this:

Code: Select all
MEMORY=`perl -ne'/^MemTotal:\s+(\d+)/ && print $1*1024;' < /proc/meminfo`

There ain't any draw backs of ZRAM if you don't exceed the 700MB amount of real RAM used in case of C1, so it's only an advantage and you still have the option to disable it if you want then enable it when ever you want to using my package. Please pay attention for what you tell to people and think before you make a post, criticizing stuff and people for the sake of criticism is really a bad thing, it's obvious how you are not willing to give anything constructive when the topic is ODROID C1, and that's possibly one reason for why I don't see your image on HardKernel WiKi anymore.

You already stated in a post that you simply don't care about the image you release for C1, If you want people to respect you respect them.
The 2GB amount of RAM is logical unlike you, you ain't logical but biased.

by **meveric** » Thu Jan 21, 2016 12:50 am

XeoSal wrote:Yes @kvetter my package shouldn't be used at all, you should've used @meveric magical package, his stuff are always better that anything else he's simply better than everyone else in every field.

You also should never ask anybody else other than @meveric for help, you simply can't make use of someone else experience, are you serious please don't compare him to me.

No one said anything about magical packages. They are simply more conservative and in sync with suggested standards of Linux community.
Also I shared "MY" experience. Ever thought that people might have DIFFERENT experiences than YOU have?

XeoSal wrote:First, you shouldn't compress more than the double amount of current real dedicated RAM, for god sake where are you going to compress the 68GB amount of RAM into this small memory space, giving these astronomical numbers of non-logical amount was a stupid idea to prove your point.

Funny, you're saying it should not use more then double the mount of RAM and still you're using a setting of 240% of available RAM? Do you realize that you contradict yourself?

XeoSal wrote:Second, it's been beneficial for thousands of ODROBIAN users and it prevented memory freezes and it will work as a logical 2GB RAM, I got feedback of people expressing how nice it is.

Once again, I said it works, I never denied that, but I'm also saying there are cases where this setting is less then beneficial but instead causes more issues than it solves.

XeoSal wrote:You should stop sanctificating yourself, this is a feasible solution for ODROID C1 that you refused to show in the past

IF that would be true, why do I have ZRAM options as well? You are aware that you talk bullshit, aren't you?
I never said ZRAM is bad, I said the way it's setup in your system is nothing that should be used. ESPECIALLY on the C1.
ZRAM compresses pages in memory. In order to access them it needs to UNCOMPRESS them. Which means in worse case it needs to constantly compress and uncompress pages in memory.
Since the CPU power of the C1 is limited this quickly drives the C1 to its CPU limits. I was able to create a scenario where even moving the mouse was already laggy cause it had to compress and uncompress so often from memory.
And that was only by using some webpages. It get's worse the more pages need to be compressed and uncompressed in memory.

XeoSal wrote:Because you hate the device, when I came and introduced it to people you tried to criticize it to make yourself feel better about what you have said before.

First of all I don't HATE the device, please stop jumping to conclusions that are simply not true. I don't like it cause for my use cases I have much better devices, such as the X2 or the U3. I don't need to like a device that's inferior to my use cases then the devices I already have. Still that doesn't mean I do not support them.
That's a difference that you seem to be unable to comprehend.

XeoSal wrote:When we discussed the solution of RAM issues on ODROID C1 on my ODROBIAN thread, you criticized the storage swap space of ram like you had no clue about that ZRAM exists, your argument was wearing the poor SD card, when I declared that ZRAM will be integrated to my distro you started showing people that actually ZRAM is a workaround for these issues in some posts of yours I saw while you didn't tell anything about it before as a suggestion to anyone, you also produced your own ZRAM package since then.

True, issue is I never needed to worry about RAM, I have devices that have twice as much RAM as the C1 and thinking about alternatives for the C1 never crossed my mind since I was not interested in that device.
Once again, I'm not saying ZRAM is a bad thing. It's working better than swap on a harddrive.
Other people mentioned it before, but I never looked into it, cause I was simply not interested in. As people started to talk more and more about it, I took a closer look into it as well. That's what called progress. Not sure what's wrong with that.

XeoSal wrote:
meveric wrote:the 4 CPU cores were constantly at 80~90% CPU but it was still claiming I had another 500MB

Another non-sense point, ZRAM will only be used when it's required, if you don't reach that amount of RAM used it won't compress anything meaning no CPU usage, having a backup memory for your multitasking needs that will prevent your device from freezing and acting as a logical 2GB ram is a big plus and advantage, you are misleading the users by telling them it shouldn't be used.

You should really learn how to read! I never said it shouldn't be used at all. You just talking bullshit here again. I said the amount you use causes issues.
I also said that there are CASES where you can provoke that kind of behavior. I never said it's like that all the time. Damn you should really go back to school and learn how to read.

XeoSal wrote:There ain't any draw backs of ZRAM

There are draw backs if you use it EXCESSIVELY, THAT and THAT ALONE is my point.

XeoSal wrote:Please pay attention for what you tell to people and think before you make a post

Please learn how to read and understand what other people say before making posts like this

XeoSal wrote:criticizing stuff and people for the sake of criticism is really a bad thing, it's obvious how you are not willing to give anything constructive when the topic is ODROID C1

It's obvious that you lack major understanding of criticism as well at what people are doing.
I DO support the ODROID C1. People contact me about the C1 and I give them advice and help them setup their system. I get PMs about C1 and I answer them. I help people solve their issues.
Not everyone is like you and can only help people by shouting out the loudest in the forums.

XeoSal wrote:You already stated in a post that you simply don't care about the image you release for C1

Yeah telling lies that's one of the things you're good at. If I wouldn't care about the C1 or supporting it, I wouldn't publish images and packages for it, but as I already said, for you it seems to be impossible to understand that there is a difference in "not supporting" and "not liking" something.

XeoSal wrote:If you want people to respect you respect them.

Like you respect them? You proven that again and again tauting members of the forum that disagreed with you, or as you simply keep telling lies?

XeoSal wrote:The 2GB amount of RAM is logical unlike you, you ain't logical but biased.

68GB are "logical" as well, doesn't mean they make sense, like many of your arguments that is.

by **kvetter** » Fri Jan 22, 2016 10:22 am

Please excuse me if this posts arrives in the wrong location.
I had asked some questions . . .

apt-get install zram-odroid
would have been enough, or simply asking for it

I actually tried " apt-get install zram-odroid" and I kept getting something like "COMMAND NOT FOUND" I even used Synaptic (GUI) and searched for zram and nothing came up. Everything I found for zram brought up a COMMAND LINE ERROR: Perhaps I did not have something installed correctly.

I typically don't use Chromium but I may give it a try using your suggestions.

I have read several posts and see that there is an issue trying to run 1080p. I changed the settings for 720p

Can I assume that aml-libs-odroid are the amcodec devices?
If adding

Code: Select all: chmod 666 /dev/am*

to /etc/rc.local is makeing amcodec devices available for Kodi, I did.

# you also need to make amcodec devices available for Kodi
# you may want to add this line to /etc/rc.local

Sorry, I thought the two lines were separate things. First line says "you need to" and the 2nd line says "you may want to".

This makes seance. Thank you

chmod 666 /dev/am*
if you check under /dev/ you will find a lot of devices starting with "am". which are for the video devices needed to use amlogic video decoder. These devices come with a permission so that "normal users" are not allowed to access them. That's why you need to change the permissions of these devices to make them accessable for all users.
Since you have to do this on each boot, it's best to put the command in the /etc/rc.local file BEFORE the exit 0 that way on each boot the correct permissions will be set.

Thank you very much
Just a novice.
Ken

by **meveric** » Fri Jan 22, 2016 3:57 pm

kvetter wrote:Please excuse me if this posts arrives in the wrong location.
I had asked some questions . . .
I actually tried " apt-get install zram-odroid" and I kept getting something like "COMMAND NOT FOUND" I even used Synaptic (GUI) and searched for zram and nothing came up. Everything I found for zram brought up a COMMAND LINE ERROR: Perhaps I did not have something installed correctly.

I placed the zram-odroid packages in my wheezy repository, since I have different packages for my other jessie image. But since the zram-odroid package has no special dependencies, I moved it to "all/main" so it's available for every image. Sorry, I didn't checked on that for a while.

kvetter wrote:I have read several posts and see that there is an issue trying to run 1080p. I changed the settings for 720p

The X11 drivers of the C1 are far from being "perfect".
Issue is the GPU drivers of the C1 have trouble with scaling (besides quite some more issues). If you run glmark2-es2 in window mode you'll get 170 FPS and more. If you run the same test in fullscreen mode @1080p it doesn't even reach the necessary 60 FPS anymore. Other 3D applications are even worse. You can look of a few examples here: http://oph.mdrjr.net/meveric/other/pictures/not-c1/gpu/
Many programs/games run in 40 FPS and below. Luckily most applications won't suffer from it and you can still use the C1 in 1080p rather fluently. But if you really want a "fluent" experience 720p is the way to go with the C1.
Altough there seem to be other issues with the C1 and 720p as well.

kvetter wrote:Can I assume that aml-libs-odroid are the amcodec devices?

Not the devices, but the drivers. Drivers to access the VPU devices/codecs. The amcodec devices under /dev/ are coming from the Kernel itself.

kvetter wrote:If adding
Code: Select all
chmod 666 /dev/am*
to /etc/rc.local is makeing amcodec devices available for Kodi, I did.
# you also need to make amcodec devices available for Kodi
# you may want to add this line to /etc/rc.local

Sorry, I thought the two lines were separate things. First line says "you need to" and the 2nd line says "you may want to".

I guess it can be a little hard to understand, I just wanted to keep the guide short, so I put the command you need chmod 666 /dev/am* together with the suggestion where to put them so it will be performed every time you boot. While this is not necessary it's convenient to do so, but others might prefer other solutions like udev rules or similar things

kvetter wrote:Thank you very much
Just a novice.
Ken

Nothing wrong with being a novice. I'm glad if I can help and answer your questions.

by **kvetter** » Tue Jan 26, 2016 8:32 am

RedLineTrain wrote:The initial boot hangs for me. Attached is the point where it hangs.
Intending to boot from an SD card -- do not have an eMMC module.

I messed up everything! Decided to re-flash Debian-Jessie-1.0~RC1-20151123-C1 to my SD card & start over. I kept hanging around the same place you are aml_emmc_**** 1379 . I spent a couple days and re-flashed 7 or 8 times with the same result. I'm running openSUSE on my regular desk-top and opened the The SUSE Studio Imagewriter is (C) 2012, SUSE Linux Products GmbH and use it to flash my SD card. The SD card booted, the processes ran and left me at the prompt, ready to go. I ended up messing up again. Again I used the Imagewriter and had no issue with the hanging around the aml_emmc_**** 1379 line. started updating, upgrading and installing a GUI.

Just used Imagewriter to flash ubuntu-14.04.3lts-lubuntu-odroid-c1-20151020 to a SD card & everything worked as it should.

For what it's worth . . . It just seemed like "I" was having issue's with the SD card auto-mounting during / too soon after running the "dd"? Imagewriter notifies you that it has to try to un mount and when you click OK it runs.

SanDisk UltraPlus 16GB microSD HCI uhs 1

by **meveric** » Tue Jan 26, 2016 3:44 pm

kvetter wrote:
RedLineTrain wrote:The initial boot hangs for me. Attached is the point where it hangs.
Intending to boot from an SD card -- do not have an eMMC module.

I messed up everything! Decided to re-flash Debian-Jessie-1.0~RC1-20151123-C1 to my SD card & start over. I kept hanging around the same place you are aml_emmc_**** 1379 . I spent a couple days and re-flashed 7 or 8 times with the same result.

None of my SD cards is causing this issue, so I have hard time trying to find a way to fix this.
Apparently it happens more often on Debian than on Ubuntu, so there "might" be a solution for that, but since I can't test it I can't really work on a fix.

kvetter wrote:I'm running openSUSE on my regular desk-top and opened the The SUSE Studio Imagewriter is (C) 2012, SUSE Linux Products GmbH and use it to flash my SD card. The SD card booted, the processes ran and left me at the prompt, ready to go. I ended up messing up again. Again I used the Imagewriter and had no issue with the hanging around the aml_emmc_**** 1379 line. started updating, upgrading and installing a GUI.

kvetter wrote:For what it's worth . . . It just seemed like "I" was having issue's with the SD card auto-mounting during / too soon after running the "dd"? Imagewriter notifies you that it has to try to un mount and when you click OK it runs.

That's why you should normally do a "sync" after a dd operation. To make sure all data is written to the SD card before trying to unmount them.

kvetter wrote:SanDisk UltraPlus 16GB microSD HCI uhs 1

I only have SanDisk Ultra and SanDisk Extreme Pro. Both work fine for me on the C1.
I'll see if I can get my hands on a different SD card to see if it causes the aml_emmc_**** 1379 issue as well.

Thanks for reporting

by **RobZ** » Tue Jan 26, 2016 10:00 pm

I also have that freeze issue after the aml... message using this image, but also with some others. I guess that this is because of the SD card incompatibility. I have a Transcend one.
An interesting thing happens with the image I made using the debootstrap guide from the other thread. It boots fine for the first time, but it doesn't automatically resize the partition during the boot. I have to do that manually by issuing a command after the login. Then on the next boot it freezes after the aml message, of course with a lot of read/write error during the boot process.
I ordered a SanDisk card, it should arrive today so I will try with it to see how it goes...
EDIT: With the SanDisk there is no problem at all.

by **kvetter** » Wed Jan 27, 2016 1:45 am

Following up on

Re: [OS] Debian Jessie
Postby RedLineTrain » Sun Nov 29, 2015 5:08 pm
The initial boot hangs for me. Attached is the point where it hangs.
Intending to boot from an SD card -- do not have an eMMC module.

I kept hanging around the same place you are aml_emmc_**** 1379 .

Again I experienced the hang at around aml_emmc_**** 1379 severial times after flashing using dd. NOTE: any usb devices "keyboard, dingle, ect" would be identified right after the aml_emmc_**** 1379 line. That's all it would do. For all practical purposes it was dead at this point.

Just wrote a big post about everything I have done in regards to dd ~ writing zero's to the first 512, dd ~ writing zero's to the entire SD card. dd ~ flashing, per user guide instructions "dd **** of=/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-STS-RDF5_SD_Transcend_00000000TS37" as well as the not recommended "of=/dev/sdb" I would "sync" 4 to 7 times after flashing. Lost it, when the post draft page timed out.

The inexpensive ARM devices seem to be an excellent way for me to learn to use the terminal without risking the data on my home/work computer running openSUSE Leap 42.1 on an old dell gx620. As well end up with a nifty little computer for my mother-in-law enabling her to be on-line for FB, e-mail & browse, create and print documents as needed. Also having greater performance and a major reduction on user space by replacing the big o tower with a cig box.

I have used the SUSE Studio Imagewriter is (C) 2012, SUSE Linux Products GmbH to create bootable ISO images on flash drives for a very long time without any problems. It is in the openSUSE repositories as well as https://github.com/mbarringer/imagewriter.

To say that I was frustrated would be putting it mildly. So I gave the OLD ImageWriter a go. Flashed Debian-Jessie-1.0~RC1-20151123-C1 to SD successfully 2 times. ImageWriter flashed ubuntu-14.04.2lts-lubuntu-odroid-x2-20150224 to another SanDisk UltraPlus 16GB SD card. It booted ran throught it's steps and left a OS ready to go.

Additionally, the SanDisk UltraPlus 16GB microSD HCI uhs 1 of which I have 2 seem to work with commenting out boot.ini

Code: Select all: # setenv disableuhs "disableuhs"

as well as uncommented,

Code: Select all: setenv disableuhs "disableuhs"

Hope this will be helpfull

by **meveric** » Wed Jan 27, 2016 5:04 am

Thanks for the intense testing.
I think I know a place where I can get a trancent card and see if that's causing the issue as well.

by **michaelvv** » Thu Jan 28, 2016 4:49 am

Hi Meveric.

I have tried your image an it's really good.

I have tried a lot of (how to make your on distro guides), including some listed in this forum,
but I'm always stocked which different kinds of errors.

Do you have some info you want to share with others who want to be able to build
sdcard images for Odroid C1(+) ???

/thanks Michael.

by **meveric** » Thu Jan 28, 2016 7:19 am

depends on how deep you want to go.
This image is based on a basic Debian Jessie Debootstrab image, and had only added a few configs + Kernel / Header specificly for the C1.
I don't need to do much, since they are already part of my repository so I only needed to install what I already made in the past.

If you want more details PM me, but it's really not that hard..

by **dblade** » Fri Jan 29, 2016 5:42 am

Hi new to forums and just recently picked up a C1+.

I am interested in details on creating the image of sd card and keeping it small. I will eventually use your image and setup it up how i like and will want to make an image of that. I suppose there is a root partition resize involved then use of dd or similar utility?

by **meveric** » Fri Jan 29, 2016 6:29 am

yes, that's how it works. First you shrink the root partition then you use dd to make a backup of your SD card. It's not very hard to do.
You can always look up with fdisk how far the patition goes.

by **meveric** » Sun Jan 31, 2016 8:58 am

Update:

I did a small update on the image addressing some points that where mentioned in this and threads for the same image on other boards.

"/" now belongs to user root
added /etc/hosts entry for odroid-jessie
addressed aml_emmc_**** 1379 issue

I finally got my hands on a SD card (Intenso) that is causing the aml_emmc_**** 1379 issue and was able to fix it for my SD card. Hopefully it will work for other SD cards as well.

The new image is listed on the original post.

by **michaelvv** » Mon Feb 01, 2016 5:54 am

meveric wrote:depends on how deep you want to go.
This image is based on a basic Debian Jessie Debootstrab image, and had only added a few configs + Kernel / Header specificly for the C1.
I don't need to do much, since they are already part of my repository so I only needed to install what I already made in the past.

If you want more details PM me, but it's really not that hard..

Hi Meveric...

I'm too "new" on this forum to be able to PM you.

Investigating a little on arch linux, as it doesn't have these issues which "clicks" on my HDMI-Spdif splitter
as your Debian image has...

by **meveric** » Mon Feb 01, 2016 7:13 am

hmm, not sure I don't have such a setting, so it's hard to track.

Can you describe more how this works?
What you did? - what software you installed, what programs you run, what setting you used, things like that...
How the issue shows? - How often does it happen, is it permanently or only sometimes, etc.

Have you tried connecting it directly to the TV instead of the HDMI-S/PDIF splitter?

by **marg** » Wed Feb 24, 2016 8:15 am

Hi !
Is it possible to "UPGRADE" your jessie to testing-stretch ver.?
i need some new programs that are @ testing , and they aren't @ jessie

generally i done this right after first boot :

I added stretch repositories then --> update/upgraded.
But when trying to install some programs ,for ex. minidlna it shows some problems about held broken packages.

Maybe i'm doing sth wrong...
(do i have to put on the list only stretch repos ? they are standalone ? or jessie-stable repositories must be there also ?)
im linux noob , but trying

Thanks for help!

by **memeka** » Wed Feb 24, 2016 12:07 pm

you can just get the debs you want from testing (download them) and install with dpkg -i

by **marg** » Wed Feb 24, 2016 4:50 pm

memeka wrote:you can just get the debs you want from testing (download them) and install with dpkg -i

I know- i reached that level of knowledge already

, i tried to install program i need before .in that way. but there was also problem with some dependencies. - there is high probability that i messed something up :mrgreen:

so i thought i must update/upgrade whole system to stretch.

few quesions :
1)Are .deb programs installed through ipkg - should work on standalone jessie system ? ( i know its testing and this question could be rhetorical

)
2)When installing Stretch - do i need to install update/upgrade whole system to its pac kages just before first boot ?
3)how should my repository list look like ? ( what repos should be in there , only stretch/testing ?)
4)Does stretch its standalone ? or its linked with some (older) packages ?

by **meveric** » Wed Feb 24, 2016 6:59 pm

Due to the many different dependencies, you probably end up either upgrading major parts of the image and have a very mixed and unstable system, or you would have to move the entire system to Debian Stretch.

For later edit /etc/apt/sources.list and change jessie to stretch then do a full system upgrade:

Code: Select all: apt-get update && apt-get upgrade && apt-get dist-upgrade

There might be some conflicts with config files or dependencies that are not correct in Stretch, but since this a very minimal installation, the issues should be very simple (if there are any issues at all).

You will most likely lose support for X11 since my packages are compiled for Debian Jessie, and armsoc drivers need to match the Xorg version to work properly.
So if you want to run a Desktop, you have to recompile these drivers on your own.

by **Goerlitzer** » Wed Mar 16, 2016 3:49 am

Hi Meveric, I just try to install with apt-get tvheadend. It didn't work because the programm didn't find bzip2. After I instaled it, tvheadend is working fine. Maybe you can integrate it in your next debian release. Thanks a lot for your work!

by **meveric** » Wed Mar 16, 2016 3:55 am

Thanks for letting me know I'm gonna check into that.