[OS] Debian Bullseye (11) C2

meveric · Post by **meveric** » Thu Dec 16, 2021 1:54 am

This is my version of Debian Bullseye (11) for the ODROID C2

I've been working on this and other images on and off, and finally I got around to getting the finishing touches on this image.

It uses Kernel 6.1.0 at the moment, but will get updates as usual from my repository.

It's a headless server image only with user root. But it has all my repositories included, which allows for easy installation and updates of packages such as Kernel and Headers and other packages.

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 htop, mc, vim and bash-completion are already installed for your convenience.

Download: https://oph.mdrjr.net/meveric/images/Bu ... -C2.img.xz md5 sha512 sig

Size compressed: 165MiB
Size uncompressed: 1.3GiB

Default Login: root
Default Password: odroid

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

Features:

Debian Bullseye (11) debootstrap image (minimal OS)
upstream u-boot 2021-10
upstream Kernel (6.1.0)
ext4 partitions for both bootfs and rootfs
unified flash-kernel config (should be fitting for all ODROID arm64 boards)
uses opensource drivers for GPU/VPU (Lima / meson-vdec)
OpenGL 2.1 and OpenGL ES 2.0 support for Mali-450 GPU

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:

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apt update && apt upgrade && apt dist-upgrade

How to convert the image into a Desktop image:
The image can easily converted into a Desktop image looking similar to this:

I created a setup tool that's already preinstalled:

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setup-odroid

Which should easily allow you to install a Desktop Environment.
Wayland desktop is also supported:

Hints:
Changing language:
If you install a Desktop environment you should already have keybord-configuration installed, it will ask upon the first installation what keyboard layout it should use.
This configuration is for your X11 Desktop so you have your desired keyboard layout.
For console you need to install console-setup to do the same, so just in case:

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apt install console-setup keyboard-configuration
dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration

should be all that is needed to change your keyboard layout.
You probably want to set timezone as well

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dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

Setting up WLAN from command line
Edit the file /etc/network/interfaces or create a new one under /etc/network/interfaces.d/ and add the following lines

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auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
    wpa-essid <NAME-OF-YOUR-WLAN>
    wpa-psk <WLAN-PASSWORD>

If you're using a "hidden" network, please also add wpa-scan-ssid 1

Webbrowser:
Hardware accelerated web-browsing is possible via Chromium WebBrowser in combination with GLESv2.
By starting chromium with the --use-gl=egl flag or configure this in your own config file under: /etc/chromium.d/ or editing the default-flags file that already exists here.
WebGL is also supported the same way:

Youtube playback up to 720p should be fine.

Video Playback
While Kodi can be installed and runs both from X11 desktop as well as directly from terminal (GBM). It does not support hardware accelerated video playback.
Therefore if you install a desktop via setup-odroid I opted for installing mpv as a video player which will support hardware accelerated video decoding of H264/MP4 files.

As usual feedback is welcome.

mad_ady · Post by **mad_ady** » Thu Dec 16, 2021 4:42 am

It's great to see such a fresh image for an old (but solid!) device. Congratulations!

Have you noticed issues like C1 shows with recent kernels? USB instability, inability to reboot, emmc initialization issues?

meveric · Post by **meveric** » Thu Dec 16, 2021 5:35 am

USB was always unstable on the C1, one of the reasons why I don't like it.
Anyway this image doesn't show any issues, although I haven't tested eMMC yet.
Reboot sometimes hangs in u-boot but that's like 1 out of 20 times or so very rare.
Aside from that I haven't seen any issues.

rockla · Post by **rockla** » Thu Dec 16, 2021 11:31 am

If someone can confirm usb stability issues are gone would definitely upgrade

Bert_N · Post by **Bert_N** » Mon Dec 20, 2021 7:51 pm

Managed to install it on my C2 with the MATE DE.
Most programs run well, but FF and Chromium leads to a crash with a reboot.

Also the installation with DE took up 7GB, which seems a lot?

FYI: I want to use the C2 as a simple game console for my kids to play some games like Supertuxracer

Any help would be appreciated a lot.

Edit: Not sure if it is relevant, but on my test desk, I am using a shared ethernet internet connection from my Windows laptop to connect the C2 to the internet.
Edit 2: I am running it from eMMC

meveric · Post by **meveric** » Mon Dec 20, 2021 8:23 pm

Hello Bert_N,

7GB seems rather big for this DE and I know it definitely wasn't that big in the past, but it could be that they changed quite a bit, I have to check that in details.
I've noticed that documentation alone sums um to 1GB of disk space alone, but yes I'll check if the size is correct.
Currently I'm using an image which has a few programs and both Gnome and MATE as a DE installed aside with about 1GB on extra data (videos for testing and stuff) which also sums up to 7GB.
So it should be smaller by default, as you don't have the second DE and videos I assume, so it should be at most around 5-6GB.

FF I haven't tested much, it definitely wasn't crashing for me, but since it was lacking any form of hardware acceleration I did not try it out much.
BUT I just remembered, just a few days ago, they updated FireFox from 78.x to 91.x ESR and from what I remember that means it now should use hardware acceleration (or at least try to).
This could cause issues, as it will only use OpenGL from what I understand and the C2 only supports OpenGL up to OpenGL 2.1 which might not be enough for FireFox.
I just tested it on an ODROID N2 where I can confirm that it now supports WebGL which did not work before.
So FF might really cause some issues, I'll check that later on my C2 to see if that really is a problem.

Chromium on the other hand should work.
Have you read my comment about this on the first post, that you should start chromium with --use-gl=egl flag to use OpenGL ES instead of OpenGL?

BTW: the C2 is not "very good" in doing gaming console task, it's not terrible, but the GPU and CPU are both not very fast and fall behind many other systems.
SuperTuxKart for example will only work in "Legacy Mode" with OpenGL 2.0 which has probably be configured in the config file first.

Other applications like emulators will run slow, especially with harder to emulate systems like N64, DreamCast, PSP, etc.

Also if you have already installed Kernel 5.15.10 (from yesterday) then make sure to upgrade again, as there where some issues with the last Kernel and I pushed an update today.

Bert_N · Post by **Bert_N** » Tue Dec 21, 2021 12:45 am

Hi Meveric,

Thanks for you quick response.
I did test Chromium with the --use-gl=egl flag, but it crashed instantly.
I ran an upgrade this morning, but will try to upgrade again.

On the other hand: my main aim was to use this C2, which was eating dust in the back of a drawer, as a simple game console for the kids.
If it is not very suited for that purpose, maybe it is better to stop investing time in this little project as a whole.

Again, thanks for the prompt reply!

Bert

chewitt · Post by **chewitt** » Tue Dec 21, 2021 2:44 am

Not to detract from the main topic, but if you want to play games it's probably best to pick a distro that's purpose built for it, e.g. Lakka or Batocera.

meveric · Post by **meveric** » Tue Dec 21, 2021 2:57 am

It really depends on what you plan to run on it.
For some people "a simple game console" means it must be able to handle emulated PS5 games.
Others think of "NES and SNES is all I want"

Overall the C2 is still a "good" board, especially with upstream Kernel, GPU and VPU drivers it has not seen the end of it's lifetime yet.
But overall the CPU is one of the first that went for arm64 and cause of that misses some features later boards have.
The GPU is still from pre-ARM64-era and it shows. The board was named to allow for 4k resolution, but the GPU already struggled with 1080p back in the days.

chewitt wrote: ↑
Tue Dec 21, 2021 2:44 am
Not to detract from the main topic, but if you want to play games it's probably best to pick a distro that's purpose built for it, e.g. Lakka or Batocera.

I also agree, but that would also limit your to things like emulators, SuperTuxKart for example is rarely in focus of any of these gaming images, as it often requires extra work to get something like this running.

Bert_N · Post by **Bert_N** » Tue Dec 21, 2021 3:06 am

It really depends on what you plan to run on it.
For some people "a simple game console" means it must be able to handle emulated PS5 games.
Others think of "NES and SNES is all I want"

Well.. to remain a bit off topic: my kids are young (5 and 8) and they enjoy SuperTuxKart on my linux mint desktop.
So that was a logical aim for me, although my desktop is a I7-3770...

The platform (emulator or linux distro) doesn't really matter a lot, as long as I can get it up and running and the games don't stutter.

Not to detract from the main topic, but if you want to play games it's probably best to pick a distro that's purpose built for it, e.g. Lakka or Batocera.

Thanks for the tips. I will check these out as well.
And any other hints are welcome.

meveric · Post by **meveric** » Wed Dec 22, 2021 2:09 am

@Bert_N
I've tested the image again with latest Kernel and GPU drivers from my repository as well as with latest version of FireFox and Chromium.
Both FF and Chromium were working fine, hardware acceleration works with Chromium with --use-gl=egl flag, FireFox even in the latest version doesn't work with WebGL but browsing works fine.

Bert_N · Post by **Bert_N** » Thu Dec 23, 2021 2:02 am

Hi @meveric
After testing Batocera, I decided to try Debian Bullseye again. Retrogames and emulators are just not my thing.
So I did a fresh install on a 8GB eMMC card and installed LXDE this time.
All seems to be running fine now, including youtube playback in chromium with the -use-gl=egl flag with audio passed through hdmi.
I installed a few linux games, such as SuperTuxRacer and Super Tux 2 and they seem to run quite ok.

Next step will be to try and get a few cheap USB gamepads running.

The only thing I noticed is that I have to try to boot at least 2 times. The first time, it always hangs on "Hit any key to stop autoboot"
Unplugging and replugging the C2 makes it boot again (I don't have a power switch installed on my C2 yet).

So thanks again for all the hard work and the support.

meveric · Post by **meveric** » Thu Dec 23, 2021 2:11 am

glad it's working for you now (even with minor errors).
I have quite some experience with gaming on linux and in the past offered many different types of games made for ODROIDs:
viewforum.php?f=91

If you find anything that looks interesting for you and might be missing let me know maybe I can help with that.

Bert_N · Post by **Bert_N** » Thu Dec 23, 2021 4:05 am

Thanks. I will for sure have a look. Is there an easy way to find the games that are available and/or run well on the C2?

meveric · Post by **meveric** » Thu Dec 23, 2021 4:40 am

I normally write in my post what I made it for and how to install it.
Sadly there is no search function for this so you have to check the games manually.
Also there is no guarantee if they work on C2 or not. I can try though and report back if they work or not.

Bert_N · Post by **Bert_N** » Thu Dec 23, 2021 5:20 am

I tried to install a few more -odroid versions of some games with apt-get, but none of them were in the repository (sdlpop, hurrican, supertux2, supertuxkart)
I believe your repositories are already included, so I assume these old applications never got ported?

meveric · Post by **meveric** » Thu Dec 23, 2021 8:35 am

yes that's true.
Mainly as many of these were originally ported due to the fact that ODROIDs do not support OpenGL and they were originally only OpenGL games, like supertux, and supertuxkart.
But that doesn't matter in Debian Bullseye anymore as the boards now have OpenGL support with the new Panfrost drivers, and therefore don't require the OpenGL ES specific versions that i created.
But some of them did not get ported yet, since Bullseye is still rather new an porting takes quite some time.

I looked into Rockbot for example and while it's "easy" to compile it for Bullseye, when I run it it looks and acts terrible.
The game was made for 320x240 and can scale to 640x480.
It uses SDL 1.2 which is very old and has only a few features, which makes it quite bad on the new boards.
If that game would have been SDL2 it would be so much easier.. even if it's running in 640x480 it could easily scale automatically to 1080p which is handled by SDL2 internally.
It's a mix of different technologies, QT to create the make file, but SDL to run the game. A very odd combination.
Which makes this game a bit hard to port.
I expect similar issues with sdlpop and hurrican, both also use SDL 1.2, so I'll see what needs to be done to port them, but that has to wait until after Christmas.

Bert_N · Post by **Bert_N** » Thu Dec 23, 2021 3:56 pm

Mainly as many of these were originally ported due to the fact that ODROIDs do not support OpenGL and they were originally only OpenGL games, like supertux, and supertuxkart.
But that doesn't matter in Debian Bullseye anymore as the boards now have OpenGL support with the new Panfrost drivers, and therefore don't require the OpenGL ES specific versions that i created.

That explains why the "native" linux versions are running fairly well now.

Don't worry about porting the other games, I will try to find a few "native" game versions that run fine.
Thanks a lot!

meveric · Post by **meveric** » Fri Dec 31, 2021 1:38 am

@Bert_N
I've uploaded a bunch of games which are now available under Debian Bullseye, included are SDLPoP and Hurrican which you mentioned earlier.
viewtopic.php?p=340856#p340856

Bert_N · Post by **Bert_N** » Fri Dec 31, 2021 10:28 pm

@meveric
Awesome! I installed Hurrican, which runs so well that I didn't get the chance to test any other games yet, because my son is playing...

Thanks again for all the help.

adelias · Post by **adelias** » Fri Jan 14, 2022 4:36 am

@meveric
Thanks for making this image available!
Is it possible to add snd-soc-pcm5102 and snd-soc-odroid-dac kernel modules or have they not been ported yet?

meveric · Post by **meveric** » Fri Jan 14, 2022 6:15 am

I can activate SND_SOC_PCM5102A but but there is no snd-soc-odroid-dac.

I have to check if I can find some info about this, I have the hardware laying around here somewhere but I doubt it will be easy to activate.

But I think you probably have ask HardKernel or tobetter about this.
He does a lot of work on upstream Kernel support for ODROIDs. Maybe he can help with this.
I can check but I doubt I will be able to do this all by myself.

adelias · Post by **adelias** » Fri Jan 14, 2022 8:08 am

OK, thanks for your help!

allenp · Post by **allenp** » Fri Feb 11, 2022 4:48 pm

@meveric thanks for this image!! I'm wondering where I could get access to the kernel source. I would like to build this kernel to use on my arch linux setup.

I have a bunch of C2 nodes for a demonstration Kubernetes cluster and I would love to upgrade the kernel so I can use ceph. I booted your image and it looks like ceph will work

Thanks again, awesome work!

meveric · Post by **meveric** » Mon Feb 14, 2022 8:28 pm

I use Kernel sources from https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/ke ... /linux.git directly.
Technically everything is upstream by now so you don't need anything specific anymore.

felipeluna · Post by **felipeluna** » Tue Jun 14, 2022 4:03 am

can anyone provide examples / tutorial / steps to compile a kernel module? the provided image comes without cifs (which I want to use to mount a samba / smb share)

$ zgrep -i cifs /proc/config.gz

# CONFIG_CIFS is not set

$

meveric · Post by **meveric** » Tue Jun 14, 2022 6:39 am

Have you updated the Kernel via apt procedures?
What Kernel are you running? - It should be 5.17.11.

CIFS should be activated, maybe the "original" Kernel the image shipped with did not have CIFS, but current Kernel 5.17.11 definitely has CIFS activated:

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zcat /proc/config.gz | grep CIFS
CONFIG_CIFS=m
CONFIG_CIFS_STATS2=y
CONFIG_CIFS_ALLOW_INSECURE_LEGACY=y
CONFIG_CIFS_UPCALL=y
CONFIG_CIFS_XATTR=y
CONFIG_CIFS_POSIX=y
CONFIG_CIFS_DEBUG=y
# CONFIG_CIFS_DEBUG2 is not set
# CONFIG_CIFS_DEBUG_DUMP_KEYS is not set
# CONFIG_CIFS_DFS_UPCALL is not set
# CONFIG_CIFS_SWN_UPCALL is not set
CONFIG_CIFS_FSCACHE=y

felipeluna · Post by **felipeluna** » Thu Jun 16, 2022 10:22 am

ok, I did apt update && apt upgrade && init 6 and the cifs rpoblem has been solved.

but

Now I have a problem with "iocharset utf-8":

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☁  ~  sudo mount /mnt/smb
[sudo] password for xxxx:
Password for guest@//192.168.0.0/Public:
mount error(79): Can not access a needed shared library
Refer to the mount.cifs(8) manual page (e.g. man mount.cifs) and kernel log messages (dmesg)
☁  ~  dmesg |& tail
[18394.563836] CIFS: Attempting to mount \\192.168.0.0\Public
[18394.569631] CIFS: VFS: CIFS mount error: iocharset utf-8 not found
☁  ~

(yes: this text has been edited)

suggestions are to install linux-generic but I dunno if doing so is a good idea with this custom debian distro

meveric · Post by **meveric** » Thu Jun 16, 2022 3:22 pm

it's not a kernel problem. The Kernel has the necessary modules.

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# zcat /proc/config.gz | grep NLS_UTF
CONFIG_NLS_UTF8=y

In fact I just tried to mount a samba share and added the iocharset=utf8 option and it's working fine.
Have you installed cifs-utils?

felipeluna · Post by **felipeluna** » Fri Jun 17, 2022 1:24 am

so I ended up fixing this by replacing utf-8 with utf8 (no dash). The earlier seemed to work in ubuntu, the latter in Debian

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

thanks for the help, meveric

anatife · Post by **anatife** » Sat Nov 12, 2022 10:38 pm

I have an Odroid C1 that I could test. Is it possible for the C1 to use this Bullseye image?

meveric · Post by **meveric** » Sun Nov 13, 2022 4:04 am

No, the ODROID C1 is a 32bit SoC this is a 64bit image, this won't work.

meveric · Post by **meveric** » Wed Dec 21, 2022 10:23 pm

Update:
Updated the base image to my unified Debian-Bullseye arm64 image with Kernel 6.1.0
Same u-boot as before.

spitfire0x00 · Post by **spitfire0x00** » Fri Jan 06, 2023 1:35 am

Does the Hifi Shield 2 work with this image or any Kernel 6.1.0 build? Really trying to get a cast receiver Hifi station + PiHole inside docker build working

meveric · Post by **meveric** » Fri Jan 06, 2023 2:14 am

Haven't tested this scenario yet.

I'll see if I can find my HiFi Shield 2 (hopefully I still have one flying around) and see what I can find out, but this can take a bit.

justin4232000 · Post by **justin4232000** » Sun Feb 05, 2023 12:16 pm

Just trying out this image on my C2, but I am getting a certificate errors.
release file for inrelease is not valid yet (invalid for another 131d)
same with oph.mdrjr.net/meveric Certificate chain uses expired certificate...
I was going to install mysql 5.7 or 8.0 on this C2, but I am not sure that is an option because of dependencies.

meveric · Post by **meveric** » Sun Feb 05, 2023 3:50 pm

when you first boot you have to wait until "date" catches up with the time.
I'm pretty sure if you try again now it will work.

justin4232000 · Post by **justin4232000** » Mon Feb 06, 2023 5:55 am

ok, this is odd.
this image does not come with a nameserver, so going into etc/resolve.conf and adding nameserver of 8.8.8.8 gets apt-update to work, but then after doing a reboot, the resolve goes back to the original setting of nameserver 192.168.1.1.
I am a newbie at linux, so I have no idea why this is occurring.
also, does anybody have experience with installing mysql? I was getting an LSB error when I tried to install it. (I didn't get that error on the HC4 that I installed MySQL on, so I am not exactly sure why there is a difference between the C2 and HC4)

meveric · Post by **meveric** » Mon Feb 06, 2023 6:44 am

/etc/resolv.conf is auto generated, the information in there you'll get from your router automatically.
If the info in there is not correct you can overwrite the default by editing /etc/dhcp/dhclient.conf and uncomment the line:

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#prepend domain-name-servers 127.0.0.1;

you can change it for example to:

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prepend domain-name-servers 8.8.8.8;

Afterwards, just reboot the system.

instead of prepend (which just adds the DNS before any other DNS server)
you can also use:

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superseed domain-name-servers 8.8.8.8;

Which forces the system to ONLY use this DNS server.

Please Note: This only works if you run the image as a headless server, if you installed a desktop environment you will have to configure network manager to use a fixed DNS server IP.

But over all this normally indicates that your router is not working correctly if 192.168.1.1 is not the IP of your router, or the router does not correctly do DNS.

Regarding MySQL server. Installing MySQL server under Debian is as simple as:

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apt install mariadb-server

Nothing else is needed. MariaDB is a opensource drop in replacement for MySQL and Maintained by opensource developers.
I would not try to manually add MySQL to the system from an external source, as you can easily damage the system this way if you don't know what you do.

The LSB error might indicate that it's trying to use lsb_release and I'm not sure if this package is pre-installed, you can install it with:

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apt install lsb-release

It's a tool that can give back OS Information, like what OS you're using and what OS version and things like that.

But as I said, this should not be required, just install mariadb-server it will install MySQL Server and all it's requirements.

justin4232000 · Post by **justin4232000** » Tue Feb 07, 2023 8:56 am

ok, thanks. I thought I was going crazy every time I restarted and apt-get failed.