IPFire on CubieTruck

Hardware
1

The status shown at: https://wiki.ipfire.org/hardware/arm is “does not work”

The relevant dtb is in /boot/dtb…-multi/sun7i-a20-cubietruck.dtb although /usr/share/u-boot does not contain a sub-directory for cubietruck. I was able to run wget http://os.archlinuxarm.org/os/sunxi/boot/cubietruck/u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin and dd that to the boot area of the uSD card.

Core 138 then booted quite readily and installed, without any problems. An upgrade to core 139 produced no errors and continued working. The only problem with basic operation is that “Shutdown” from web interface does not work.

I did not explore onboard WiFi and the 8 GB of NAND storage did not appear.

Does this warrant the status being changed to “partly working” ?

2

Yes I think so. I am not aware that anyone of the IPFire devs has access to this board, so it probably just didn’t get tested by someone.

3

I’ve explored the Cubietruck installation somewhat more. Filesystems on the SD card had been damaged, as those are wont to do, by unclean shutdown. The u-boot-sunxi-spl.bin file I had obtained from archlnuxarm did not provide display on HDMI whereas that from openSUSE Leap 15.1 did - so I used the latter. I also used the test core 139 from https://people.ipfire.org/~arne_f/testing/armv5tel/core139/

VGA & serial work and HDMI did following the first reboot.

Other functions that work include: Backup (have not tested restore), DHCP server (green), IPS (red & bluie), CUPS, ExtraHD (SATA SSD), various status pages. Shutdown from web interface DOES work - perhaps I was too impatient previously. I don’t routinely use any other functions.

All of the wireless configuration, (configuraton green+red+blue, blue “NIC”, blue address, hostapd, blue access) went smoothly, but I can’t get my Bauhn devices to connect. Those complain about “avoided poor internet connection”, as those are wont to do