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Last active July 22, 2020 21:19
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Getting a RockPro64 ARM Board Up and Running
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rockpro64_setup.md

This information is now outdated. I was not able to get any images running 5.4 kernels to work, but images with the 4.4 kernel work just fine.

Installation

I was only able to get one Ubuntu/Debian image out of all of them from the Rock64 wiki to work, and it was a minimal Debian image with a kernel tailored for media uses. According to what I saw on the forums, I'm not the only person with this issue. Big thanks to @mrfixit2001 for making that one working image available.

This is the process I went through to get things to work.

  • Download the RockPro64 image from here.
  • Use Etcher or the xz command to write that to an (>=4 GB) SD card. Note that the Rock64 boards are known to be finicky about SD cards.
  • Boot the RockPro64 board from the SD card.
  • If you have an eMMC module installed, download the image onto the SD card using wget https://github.com/mrfixit2001/debian_builds/releases/download/190531/rockpro64-debian-mrfixit-190531.img.xz.
  • If you have an eMMC module installed, write the image to it with xz -cd rock*.img.xz > /dev/mmcblk1. The eMMC should be mmcblk1, but you can check with lsblk.
  • Shut down the RockPro64 board.
  • Remove the SD card.
  • Power the board up to boot from the eMMC.
  • The root partition fills up quickly, so I had to merge the home and root partitions and make them take up the rest of the disk. This is done with the command sudo touch /usr/bin/2parts.touch followed by a reboot. That command is mentioned in the image's readme.
  • It should now be possible to start installing the software you need on top of the minimal system.

General Notes

Some other notes from my time with the RockPro64.

  • The image has multiple customizations, and some time will be required to figure out how those effect daily usage.
  • I have an aluminum case that comes in contact with the CPU to dissipate heat. The case ends up getting very warm, so I wouldn't want to run this board without a very good heat sink.
  • I was not able to get the Gnome 3 or Cinnamon desktops to start up properly. Gnome 3 presents a blank background with a mouse cursor that I can move, but there's no login prompt. Cinnamon allows me to log in but then says that it has crashed.
  • LXDE, XFCE, MATE and KDE all "work" for me. I put the word work in quotes because they each have weird quirks on the ARM platform. For instance, LXDE had an issue where the window wouldn't keep up with the mouse when I dragged it and left a temporary trail of windows behind. MATE will do that sometimes when the processor is under a heavy load, but LXDE does it all the time.
  • Firefox crashes immediately on startup as does Chromium. I ended up installing Midori and it runs, but crashes periodically and doesn't display a lot of modern sites like Github's correctly.
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