Ubuntu
actually I’m looking exactly for ways to get there
hello ,
what do I need to do in order to install a linux that is not coming from khadas ?
I mean the oowow is really neat - but I prefer a non-tempered linux to work with .
thank you and best regards,
peter
Hello @petep
What kind of you image want to install ? Please make sure it can work on Edge2 before you do that.
hello @numbqq,
not decided yet - but probably arch or opensuse - does it make a difference “on how to install a non-khadas OS” ?
which still leaves my question open 
→ how do I do that ?
I couldn’t find any guide related to that .
best regards,
peter
You might not, those that are at a level to do that don’t post “how to’s” on the internet.
@petep - i loosely outline the steps here. loosely because i haven’t actually done it myself. but from the research i did, it’s not too difficult if you know your way around linux. i also include 2 links for fedora.
There usually have two types of images:
If the image uses the generic partition table, then you just need to write it to the SD card with dd command and insert it to Edge2.
hello @numbqq ,
thank you very much !
this is an answer I was looking for - although I haven’t seen any SD card slot … neither on the case (I bought the ARM PC edition) nor on the board layout shown on your page → https://www.khadas.com/edge2
can you tell me how I would be able to “add/insert” a SD card to my edge2 then ?
again - thank you so much
All Ive found are bootloader options to switch between the eMMC card and the SPI flash… nothing to change boot priority to USB… which with a USB adapter you can run off micro sd card… but alas… no option to boot from it it seems in OOWOW…
Personally… I wanted onboard android OS on eMMC… with a switchable USB boot to load TruNAS… with Kali… Backbox… Arch… Ubuntu… and even windows via VM’s…
Fedora has a product out there called the ARM imager. It contains built-in support for some common SBC boards, but the Khadas product range isn’t amongst them. I’m not sure they even have any Rockchip SoCs supported at all.
Just getting them to boot will depend on several board-specific tweaks depending on what bootloader they leverage (Petitboot, Uboot etc.) - it’s not like they all have a standardized BIOS/UEFI like a fully-fledged PC does.
Because Fedora is quite militant about their open source policy, any board which requires proprietary closed-source software won’t be directly supported, or only components of the system which do have proper open-source support will work once its installed. A good example is you can image Fedora aarch64 onto an Nvidia Jetson but the GPU component will never work, because it requires a proprietary driver.
Your best bet for support, or at least an intelligent discussion, would likely be Armbian. They are also very much open source purists, do a lot of heavy lifting to get paid peanuts and thus whatever support eventually comes from that project will have parts that work and parts that won’t (IE hardware video acceleration is notoriously hard to achieve)
Please remember the Edge2 is very, very new. The latest news on full Kernel support (AKA, “Mainline Support”) is very thin on the ground. This is recent-ish news on the previous generation Rockchip, the 3568: RK3566 & RK3568 processors to get Linux mainline support soon - CNX Software - so even that isn’t fully working on Mainline as of yet. I have a 3568-based SBC from another manufacturer and whilst is works largely fine on mainline, some common things like hardware mpeg4 decoding won’t work. For that I need a Rockchip-based linux with a proprietary Media Processing Platform (MPP) - I don’t like that, because I don’t know what it does under the hood, and you’ll get a similar answer from most of the rest of the Open Source Community.
These aren’t like PC’s. There’s far less standardization on the hardware side, and in many cases the developers building in support are sitting in front of one of them trying to poke various register addresses directly to get it working. You’ll be deep into the weeds trying to bring one of these boards up and ideally would need to have a background in developing kernel drivers to have a chance.
If I understand correctly, right now all the Khadas builds are probably based off Rockchip’s proprietary linux build which can be cloned from their github repo. To their credit, they’ve done a good job building and packaging it and making it easy for users to install. Rebuilding it all without the proprietary Rockchip stuff is going to be a non-trivial matter.
Last I checked, the status of the Edge2’s SoC the RK3588 - was that it would boot to a console on mainline and that was about it ( Basic RK3588 Support [LWN.net] )
hello @wavelet ,
wow that was a lot to take in - thank you so much for the inside .
so even if we could simple add an SD card (still wondering how that works) - it won’t be as easy as @numbqq described then ?
or might it still work ?
you’re right - Khadas deserves lot’s of credit for all their effort … the thing is …
when I install any OS and work the way I usually do with it … I expect it to behave the same - regardless on which machine that might be … and having used “Khadas Ubuntu” I experienced that it doesn’t …
simply installing firefox via apt didn’t work … told me to use snap → tried that … didn’t work either … was not able to resolve some URLs from dl.khadas... and that alone for me is enough to not want to use it and instead go with … well … whatever arm64 linux image will take the cake
Yes, bringing up this board on a mainline kernel/different distro is a nontrivial task. I’d expect to see some movement on this by late summer, at the earliest. Much of this will be dependent on Rockchi['s level of commitment to open sourcing their drivers. We already had a huge pile of duds with Amlogic being particularly shady, so we’ll have to see how it pans out.
You may need to adjust your expectations of it working the same if you’re running on a very different hardware platform. Sometimes the differences might not be discernable as an end user, but once you try to do anything more than very basic things they will quickly become apparent. One could argue that with standardization on x86 we’re all a little spoiled.
What you’re describing sounds like a network issue, not a Khadas Ubuntu issue. Either your ISP or a firewall on your router is blocking the khadas download server, or you have a DNS issue on your local network that’s preventing devices from resolving the IP. It’s possible the Khadas server was down but it’s generally been pretty solid in my experience.
Check your network settings, router DNS and firewall, and try again, it ought to work.
If your local DNS or ISP DNS server is screwy, you could try going to network settings → IPv4 and putting 9.9.9.9, 1.1.1.1, 8.8.8.8 in the DNS field, and switching it off automatic (afaik Ubuntu uses network manager so it ought to be there) - this will force it to use Cloudflare and Google DNS, bypassing local DNS servers.
hm … that would be very odd since the download of the image(s) using oowow didn’t cause any problems … and when I got that right then these images are also located there 
DNS is already setup the way you proposed 
on my router - usually I would ask for another idea but frankly … as already indicated by yourself
For that I need a Rockchip-based linux with a proprietary Media Processing Platform (MPP) - I don’t like that, because I don’t know what it does under the hood
I don’t like that myself very much - having a Khadas-based linux where some apt/snap packages are being download from non standard repos