Twister OS Armbian 2.01 on VIM3! GL Acceleration Fan and AUDIO - Full HOWTO and Working Image DL

Amazing job here, I just ordered a Vim3 Pro and should be firing it up in a couple of days. It takes(1-2) business day only for delivery.

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edit on below, it was a bad flash on my udisk. I was able to boot after a good flash on another usbā€¦ See my post at the end

@JeremiahCornelius

It failed to boot on mainline ubootā€¦ i created through rufus on a Udiskā€¦ throws below errors and reboots again and again

Interesting, Yasir.

Iā€™ve only tested from MicroSD. Iā€™ll have to try on a USB and get back to you, some time later.
I suspect itā€™s the uBoot that you have on the eMMC, which supports your Manjaro install - but I canā€™t yet be sure.

The VIM3 really is worth it, even if you arenā€™t touching the NPU. Youā€™ll have fun.

Sdcard or USB shouldnā€™t make a difference. As far as I remember, balbes150 armbian for vims were built in a way that they only booted with legacy uboot which is present on an Android installation on emmc.

You might have to hack together mainline Debian with armbian for vim3 to make it work with mainline ubootā€¦

Nope. I had a Fenix mainline uBoot on mine. Booted micro-SD on first run, without even changing the RK3399 DTB or overlays.

The problem is the stock Android uBoot that is on VIM3 by default.

Iā€™d updated this earlier, by flashing a Fenix Ubuntu to eMMC with Krescue.

If you have the Android uBoot, itā€™s useless. Itā€™s also hard to change for a Fenix uBoot and preserve partitions - because it uses neither GPT or MBR.

If you want to preserve your Manjaro, I suggest you use Krescue first, and get a full eMMC backup image. No matter what else you do with the system!

I donā€™t have android uboot. I have mainline uboot which i downloaded and flashed through krescue. Link below:

https://dl.khadas.com/Firmware/Krescue/images/Khadas.UBOOT.mainline.emmc.kresq

On this new uboot , i have manjaro installed and running and i donā€™t wanna erase it, i just wanna try twister on sdcard/udiskā€¦

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Iā€™m totally sure of that. It wouldā€™ve been nice if Khadas had released a Vim3 Max version w/128Gb eMMC like the Edge-V Max, a 32Gb non-removable eMMC storage seems quite small. IMHO, a 128Gb eMMC storage represents the sweet spot for linux desktop use.

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you canā€™t deny the fact that eMMC is much better for a desktop than random SD cards, but in the essence, using an SSD or a spinner is even way more better, and provisional support has been provided in that part :slightly_smiling_face:

using an NVMe SSD for desktop data is miles more optimized and better for a desktop than large quantities of eMMC

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Yes, thatā€™s the uBoot I started from. Hmmn. Iā€™ll try to repro.

You have opened America to us now.:grinning:
Yasir_Javed talks about trying as a second system.:wink:

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@JeremiahCornelius
Bro, just wanted to let you know, it was my mistake and a bad flash.

I tried again with a new sdcard and it booted successfully :sweat_smile:

The packed image is 2.6gb and when I write to USB sdcard, itā€™s 14.5 gb image and somewhere during burning, it went wrong so didnā€™t boot.

Now itā€™s up and running. I didnā€™t run it for long however desktop, apps, file manager, mpv video playback all went superb. Boot up and shutdown times are wonderful, didnā€™t check wifi or Bluetooth. Will share my detailed impressions later on.

By the way good workā€¦ Maybe we can ask @hyphop to add this to Krescue image dump, more options for vim3 users :slight_smile:

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Working amazingly well from uSD 32Gb Sandisk Extreme Pro, much faster than any of my RK3399ā€™s(2.0Ghz/1.5Ghz) from eMMC or NVMe. Clock speeds are 2.4Ghz for A73cores and 2.016Ghz for A53. HardInfo, Neofetch and armbian-config are confirming these CPU clock speeds.
Blazing fast speeds as a linux desktop. This is my new favorite ARM SBC.
USB3 boot is not working for me either. I will attempt to transfer uSD image to eMMC and report back later.

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This is great to hear. My own subjective impression is that this was my best SBC desktop yet, including an impressively overclocked RPi4-8GB.

In every measure, it is kicking-arse on my 2012 Mac Mini Server with Debian Bullseye. This machine was just retired for the VIM3, and its 2 512Gb spindles will be repurposed.

I have updated the VIM3 TwisterOS image.
This is a minor revision, with less ā€œslack spaceā€ at the end of the EXT4 filesystem, and replaces the /usr/lib/nand-sata-install/exclude.txt file. With this in place, the system can be transferred to emmc very easily, using the Armbian stock nand-sata-install tool in /usr/sbin.

TORRENT: https://archive.org/download/twister-osarmbian-vim-3-v-2-0-1b.img/twister-osarmbian-vim-3-v-2-0-1b.img_archive.torrent

HTTP: https://archive.org/download/twister-osarmbian-vim-3-v-2-0-1b.img/TwisterOSArmbianVim3-V2-0-1b.img.xz

MD5sum: https://archive.org/download/twister-osarmbian-vim-3-v-2-0-1b.img/TwisterOSArmbianVim3-V2-0-1b.img.md5

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Yasir, I appreciate the complements. Most credit goes to the various original contributors and configuration efforts. I was merely persistent in organizing and assembling these.

Iā€™m glad that your troubles were resolved with a re-imaging. If you look in this thread, I have an updated image, which reduces the ext4 slack space, and replaces a missing file which was preventing the Armbian nand-sata-install tool from working. Transfer to eMMC is now as simple as any other Armbian supported device.

This is all done. nand-sata-install is funny! It doesnā€™t transfer ITSELF to a target image, as a failsafe, I suppose.
My images were missing the necessary exclude.txt, so the rsync command in the tool was failing. Everythng is fixed in the updated image, and I have transferred this several times now, in my testing.

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Good to know, will do it with your newly updated image. So, what exactly did you remove?

I chopped off 4GB of empty ext4 formatted space. Fixed a missing exclude.txt that Armbian needs for its rsync job to transfer system to eMMC.

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Iā€™m very happy that the cooling fan is working!