Posts by jim_p

Trick question: Would another dtb help in identifying that wifi chip?

I know how bad realtek's support is on linux, I have seen it all those 15+ years that I use it as my main os, so yea, no need to apologize for not including drivers for it in the image.

Regarding dtb files, I searched the ones from ce and the one I used back then is indeed gxb_p200_1g. Its github page has them too, and they seem like plain text files.

If there is a way to reinstall either android or ce, I would like to know how. I would prefer ce, because android on it is just unusable garbage.

I am now looking through dtech's thread in case I ever posted some hw id from it there. For the record, dtech also has an image file for s905 with realtek wifi.

I just got the tvbox back, so there you go.

https://imgur.com/a/O5TdEEc

The neighbor literally destroyed all 4 feet instead of opening small holes on them. Now the tvbox has no feet at all

Tbh, if I knew that I had to go through all that (finding the right dtb, the box not being able to boot from its emmc anymore, wifi not being detected, taking the box apart etc), I would not try it at all. But my stupid head wanted at least a device at home to run kodi 20! This has more issues than the le 11 images for rpi and the x64 image combined!

Anyway, if the wifi is one of the forementioned ones and can not work, I will install lakka/batocera on it and play old games

I found a stock firmware image for it that contains the files in the picture. Shall I upload any of them?

What do you mean "from the original vendor kernel"? For instance, would a dmesg from ce help? Or even a device tree from it, e.g. from dtech's images?

Taking it apart means I have to "break" its feet to get to its screws, because they are glued very tightly and I don't want to do that. I may ask the neighbor to drill holes on them so as to get to the screws...

This xda thread has a high res photo and a tip for getting it into recovery mode.

MXQ Pro 4k Recovery mode S905

Hi all, just picked up an MXQ Pro 4K android box from bangood…

forum.xda-developers.com

I installed system tools manually (downloaded the zip, extracted it in /storage/.kodi/addons and then enabled it through kodi), so here is an output of lshw in case it helps more. It does not list wifi though.

http://ix.io/4nlA

You are right, I did not mention the most important thing! So, it's an mxq pro 4k, with s905, 1gb or ram, 100Mbps ethernet... and no idea about the wireless.

And from all the dtb files in there, the ones that are generic and start with meson-gxbb-* are meson-gxbb-p200 and meson-gxbb-p201.

Here is pastekodi with all the info.

http://ix.io/4njx

I do not really care about the speed of each component, but I think that emmcs last longer than sd cards. Ideally though, I would rather have a small usb stick, like the sandisk fit series, in usb1 than have an sdcard pop out from the side.

Any ideas on dtb files? I do not expect some dtb that is specific to a device to work, e.g. the... 90% of the files in /flash/dtb/, but I do not know which one to try next. Moreover, the path to the device tree id has now changed to

# cat /proc/device-tree/model
Amlogic Meson GXBB P201 Development Board

---edit
I forgot to mention the wifi. Wlan0 does not even exist as an interface!

# ifconfig wlan0 up
ifconfig: ioctl 0x8913 failed: No such device

Straight from the other thread, this was the last command I ran on ce. And no, it is definitely s905. Anyway, no reason to worry about it now. Pm me if you need more info, no need to mess the thread with irrelevant stuff.

# cat /proc/device-tree/amlogic-dt-id
gxb_p200_1g

Does this mean I can delete the firmware file I "installed" earlier? I also added "nosplash progress" as boot parameters, so as to check if any other systemd service fails, but the forementioned one is the only one that does.

I will give meson-gxbb-p201.dtb a try right now.

Yaaay it worked! It booted to the tty without poping that error about ethmactool and ifconfig does show eth0.

I connected it to my router and I can now access it via ssh.

I also noticed it can not access the emmc module at all. It is not visible in blkid and emmctool says "no emmc module detected". This means I can say goodbye to any hopes of booting it again from its internal storage.

Before that, coreelec 9.2.x was installed. I got the 2 tvboxes (mxq "all black" and mxqpro4k) the same day, but because you only provide images for the one with s805, I could not leave the other one with android and ce was the only option I had.

There was not much point in upgrading too, but I gave it a try

There you go. The keyboard and the wifi stick were already plugged in at boot.
https://paste.debian.net/hidden/c19d5833/

Stuff I noticed

- there is no wired interface in ifconfig, just loopback

- there is no wireless interface in ifconfig, although the driver for the wifi stick appears loaded in lsmod

- there is no rebootfromnand or installtointernal anymore

As for the dtb, I know here are other dtb files in there, but I hesitate to use another one in case it bricks the tvbox. When I was trying ce on it, its wiki was mentioning a gxl_p212_1g. It did not work at all and I had to find the proper dtb with the command I mention above.

The same things happen with that image as well.

In order to update it, because there is no network access, I had to insert the sd card on my pc, go to the .update folder and manually download the file in there. The update process was started at next boot and finished successfully. although it popped up some messages on the screen right before it auto-rebooted.

Before giving up, because it is 7am here and I have just woken up, I tried the wireless usb card I used on my rpi zero non-w, a tplink wn722n (the v1 version that came with atheros chipset and has great linux compatibility), but there is still no wireless option in libreelec settings.

There is no toothpick method for this tvbox because it has no reset button inside there. As I have explained in the other thread, the only way to make it boot from sd is to run "reboot update". But that needs terminal/ssh access.

Anyway, once I am done with le 11, I will try your image again. Thank you for the info.

I jsut tried your s905 generic image on my mxqpro4k. It does not boot with any of the 3 relevant dtb files (gxbb_p200_1G_100M.dtb, gxbb_p200_1G_100M_RealtekWiFi.dtb and gxbb_p200_1G_mxq_pro_4k.dtb).

Thank you for all the info. I just booted it and this time I completed that "first run wizard" so as to get to a working enviroment.

I now have le11 running on it, so here are the 2 major issues I noticed with a first glance.

There is no networking, wired or wireless. For the wireless part, the first run wizard showed no wireless networks to connect to, so I went to libreelec settings > network. There is no switch in there to turn the wireless interface on.

Moreover, the switch for the wired interface, under the same menu, turns off the second I turn it on! Could it be related to the systemd service error above?If it helps, it has no wire connected to it. That is because the monitor I connect my stuff to is away from the router and I do not have a long cable for it.

If I move the tvbox close to the router to connect it via ethernet, thus lose the video output to see what is going on, the leds on the network card light up, but it gets no ip as I can see from my router's settings.

And no network means no ssh access. And no ssh access means I can not provide a log. Also, since it can not boot to ce anymore, providing any info for the hardware itself, e.g. its wifi card, is impossible.

I just tried dtech's image for s905 and it simply stops at the amlogic logo. I tried all 3 dtb files availble.

I am now flashing le 11 b1 back to it.

I did it! Good news first. I sshed to coreelec and I ran "reboot update", just like I did when I installed coreelec on it (I found the howto I had followed back then).

On the next boot, and right after that blue tinted screen, it booted from the sd card and reached kodi after a while. I am so excited!

I will work on it sometime this weekend. I will also need to do the same on that testing image that is for s805, once I get the all black mxq in my hands

The bad news is that

- systemd pops a failed service on boot, ethmactool-config.service. No idea what this is.

- when the card is not on the tvbox, it just stops at that blue tinted screen and does not boot to coreelec anymore

I had faced that last issue again when I had tried coreelec from the sd, but I do not remember how I had solved it. Somehow I made it boot back to android, but how?

p.s. That blue tint might be an issue with my old dell monitor. It does not happen at all on the tv.

How can I boot a s905 tvbox that already runs coreelec 9.2.x from its internal storage? I downloaded the image of le 11 b1, flashed it on the sd card, edited the uEnv.ini file, but all I get is a blue-tinted image of the amlogic boot picture, then complete darkness, followed by a non-tinted image, followed by the regular boot to coreelec. All that happens in like 5 seconds.

Normally, the amlogic boot picture is not tinted, shows up only once and right after that it boots to coreelec.

Its device tree is

# cat /proc/device-tree/amlogic-dt-id
gxb_p200_1g

so I wrote this on the uEnv.ini file

dtb_name=/dtb/meson-gxbb-p200.dtb
bootargs=boot=UUID=2001-4326 disk=UUID=1f15e972-a53f-4d06-9d5f-a1195c38a657 quiet systemd.debug_shell=ttyAML0 console=ttyAML0,115200n8 console=tty0

None of the four options mentioned in the wiki apply to it, that is why, back when I installed coreelec on it, I had to use a terminal-like android app to boot to recovery, then boot from the sd and do the rest.