Getting started

[Mikerr]

So you have a new Tinkerboard, other things you need:

Power supply with micro USB connector (2.5A recommended)
Micro SD card (4GB+)
Monitor with HDMI cable 
Keyboard and Mouse

•  First go download the SD image at https://www.asus.com/uk/supportonly/TInk..._Download/ - select OS / Others / TinkerOS_Debian   Download  [1.01GB]
  

              ( if you prefer other OS like Android, Armbian etc have a look here: Other OS )

• Write this to an SD card with Etcher on Windows / Mac  /Linux  (Download )  or Win32DiskImager ( Download ) 
  

                                      
          Note Etcher can use the downloaded zip file as is, win32diskimager needs you to extract the .img first.

• Insert microSD into the tinkerboard and it should boot to a desktop after 30 seconds or so.
  

           Note The screen will remain blank during bootup - no text displayed until the desktop appears

                                      

             Experienced users can SSH in immediately with user/pass linaro:linaro

[gregoryfenton]

Good luck with the forum.
I'd better get a tinkerboard now :p

[brianw]

I would add that it is important to install the supplied heatsink as it can get very HOT when running cpu intensive applications.

Brian

[vr00n]

Trying to dd the TinkerOS_Debian.img using MAC OS X

Tried as follows
1. Unmounting
2a. sudo dd bs=8192 if=TinkerOS_Debian.img of=/dev/disk2
AND
2b sudo dd bs=1m if=TinkerOS_Debian.img of=/dev/disk2 (separately)
3. Eject SDCard

Then I load SDcard into TinkerBoard - board does not boot - I see a mouse pointer after 30 secs and the screen simply refreshes and the board appears to reboot.

Please help

/\ \/

[tkaiser]

board does not boot - I see a mouse pointer after 30 secs and the screen simply refreshes and the board appears to reboot.

Sounds like underpowering. Choosing Micro USB for such a beefy board is simply asking for troubles (RPi forums are full of this issue, Pine64 forum is full of this and now the story continues here). See also: 

• https://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topi...le/?p=8311
  
• https://forum.mqmaker.com/t/miqi-based-b...ning/605/9
  

BTW: on OS X and Windows better use Etcher to write SD card images, it verifies the burning process and can therefore rule out the other major source of troubles with SBC: broken image on SD card.

[tinkernik]

board does not boot - I see a mouse pointer after 30 secs and the screen simply refreshes and the board appears to reboot.

Sounds like underpowering.

I agree. Mine did very similar. Even on some apple USB PSUs.
Mine now has a 2.5A official Raspberry Pi PSU and runs great

[tkaiser]

Mine did very similar. Even on some apple USB PSUs.
Mine now has a 2.5A official Raspberry Pi PSU and runs great

The 'problem' with Apple PSUs is a) there are a lot of fake ones around and b) those PSUs only have a type A receptacle and it's up to the user in question to use a bad (read as 'average') Micro USB cable. Most of these cables are simply 'broken by design' and not suitable to power anything that needs more than a few hundred mA (USB 2.0 standard is about 500 mA maximum!). You need short cables rated AWG24 or better (I use AWG20 for those SBC with crappy Micro USB) otherwise even good/stable PSUs are of no use since the voltage drop caused by the cable's resistance is way too high.

Regarding 2.5A rating please read through https://www.loverpi.com/blogs/news/93532...comparison (especially the last paragraph, Micro USB has too tiny contacts and is rated for only 1.8A max)

The official RPi3 PSU is not the worst choice since PSU voltage is above 5.1V (to compensate somehow for the cable's voltage drop) and it has a fixed cable with rather low resistance.

IMO it's really amazing that ASUS repeated this mistake and uses crappy Micro USB for this beefy board. Maybe the forum moderators here are faster than those of Pine64 forum where it took ages to assemble some sort of a FAQ mentioning the two most common issues users will be running into: Broken SD card images and powering issues

[gooze74]

Hi everyone,

I own a Tinker board too and I feel this board is still quite limited with the current development stage of TinkerOS.
I would like to use it as a media center and to put two RAID 1 disks in USB for storage. Unfortunately, the Xorg server lacks 2D acceleration and I did not find any video player with hardware decoding... Moreover, there is no md or raid1 kernel modules...
So I did some research to build a custom Debian with the Tinker board and it is probably possible to do it. Here are the most important ressources :

http://rockchip.wikidot.com/linux-user-guide - Rockchip wiki guide. Please notice the third config board line. There is mention of "tinker-rk3288_defconfig" so the tinker board has the "miniarm" board name for Rockchip. There is also a brief explanation on how to build a complete system with some provided scripts (Section "Using build sciprt" ... Nice orthograph).
https://github.com/rockchip-linux - You would need to clone the "build", "kernel", "u-boot" and "rk-rootfs-build"

To continue building your own system, you will need a Ubuntu Linux on your computer and follow the wiki. So far, I was able to build a working kernel with RAID support and to add it to the vanilla TinkerOS. The "build" repo contains script to build the kernel, u-boot, creating the .img file and then to flash on SD card. The "rk-rootfs-build" repo contains the Debian system and some explanation on how to build, it is also possible to have a system without LXDE/Xorg.
However, I was not able yet to have a bootable image, there is even a bug in the u-boot build script for miniarm where you need to change the filename for the configuration (I entered an issue in the github project).

[gooze74]

Finally working !! It was really worth it guys !! I have hardware video decoding with 2D acceleration yeehhaaa !!
The problem was with the build/extlinux/rk3288.conf file which were really wrong...
Replace it with this one :

label kernel-4.4
kernel /zImage
fdt /rk3288-miniarm.dtb
append earlyprintk console=tty1 console=ttyS2,115200n8 rw root=/dev/mmcblk0p7 rootfstype=ext4 init=/sbin/init

about:gpu chromium screenshot : http://imgur.com/a/9EurO

[brianw]

Finally working !! It was really worth it guys !! I have hardware video decoding with 2D acceleration yeehhaaa !!
The problem was with the build/extlinux/rk3288.conf file which were really wrong...
Replace it with this one :

label kernel-4.4
   kernel /zImage
   fdt /rk3288-miniarm.dtb
   append  earlyprintk console=tty1 console=ttyS2,115200n8 rw root=/dev/mmcblk0p7 rootfstype=ext4 init=/sbin/init

Thats very encouraging, I was going to investigate building the u-boot and kernel myself but have been tied up with other things and as it is I won't be able to start for another two weeks.  At least now I know it is possible with the sources available. I was hoping Asus would have updated the software by now but I guess a company the size of Asus moves rather slowly.  

Thanks for your efforts,