Received R1 yesterday. Appreciate how well it was packed. Also appreciated Linaro preinstlled but have ubuntu 2204 lts on all my sbcs. Though it looks like grub was installed once, there is not apparently efi or bootloader on the emmc. So, I cannot get the device to boot from USB to install. Also challenged by having to change locale from cn to en, with many tools still displaying cn.
Please advise how to facilitate boot from usb, so I can install ubuntu.
So looking at the fstab and partition tables, uboot is the bootloader. The emmc partition table has NO fstype assigned to any partition. I wanted to try create a partition for efi so I could continue installing grub… there is a partition called boot but it is not mounted (and has no type). It appears not to be fat… I was hoping to edit something to boot from usb… It appears the boot “button” on the device causes the device to use tty serial console to do something… but I do not have a cable or rig presently to support serial console. This too should be configurable! At least I know now only uboot is present. So I am still stuck installing another distribution. AND all packages are locked down, and point to CN debian repos. I can’t install build-essential!!! So I can’t build anything on the device with the current distro. Effectively the device is a brick out the box, and your documentation is all TODO. I haven’t given up yet… and you need to be more clear the wifi adapter is not included in the package - as the kernel does not include any modern usb wifi driver (I have).
So this is barely useful. After not finding any links to download the micro usb drivers, or the rkdev tool, I found them (after some searching) elsewhere. I installed them on a Windows computer, changed the language to english, and …
Now what?
It looks like I need a config file that describes the partitions. It doesn’t seem obvious that I can download what is on the emmc. Also, is there an ubuntu server image available from you? If so - where? (Is it behind the gdrive link your customers dont have permission to access?)
I got a bit further ahead. Seems if I run the rkdevtool in adminstrator mode, I see “found one loader device” (instead of maskrom or adb), and I can read the partition table and query the device (from the advanced menu). So … do you have an ubuntu LTS image, or xubuntu image, that I can flash??
Have you since made progress with this? I noticed on the wiki that there’s some procedure for connecting the board to a Windows PC via USB-A to USB-A cable (following installing USB driver) and loading a Debian or Ubuntu image. I have not tried this yet and honestly there are very few details provided. The screenshots show a bit of what is happening on the Windows side but the UI of the demonstrated system is not in English.
In short, my R1 came with Android loaded and I want to figure out how to put Debian or Ubuntu on it. By the way, there is also an NVMe slot. Would that make it easier to load a new system?