User:Brendlefly62/Radxa ROCK Pi 4C Plus/Getting to Know the Board

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Learn from Others

It may be instructive to see what developers of other distributions have built "under the hood" when they put together the images available to download for this SBC...

Start with a Debian installation

Getting started with Debian is nearly trivial, but the process and the resulting mature system can reveal important information that may not be easily available from other sources, particularly when working with a board for which there is no documentation of Gentoo use, maybe not even a publicly available device tree blob file. The investigative process basically entails downloading a system image file to your PC and flashing it to removable storage media (micro SD Card).

See https://wiki.radxa.com/Rockpi4/downloads and https://wiki.radxa.com/Rock4/getting_started

Now go here to see what Debian has under the hood ...

(and/or) Move on to an Armbian installation

It is possible to use a procedure identical to that outlined above -

Or, it may be more instructive to build Armbian from scratch

  • Armbian Sources are available on GitHub
  • The author found this YouTube video very easy to follow -- How to Compile Armbian: Step-by-Step Tutorial for Beginners The armbian/build build script is very impressive, but it is only "supported" on Ubuntu 64
    • Pre-requisites:
      • 64 bit Host computer
      • Linux or windows running VirtualBox if this isn't an Ubuntu 64 system
      • An SD card reader in (or connected to, via e.g. USB) the host system
      • Install Ubuntu
Note
The author used a Windows 11 PC to install VirtualBox and then installed Ubuntu inside VirtualBox using an installation CDROM .iso file image, as outlined in the video
  • Retrieve armbian/build sources
root #commands to get sources
  • Run the "compile.sh" script
root #compile.sh [example output]

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