plugged it in and nothing happened

[danielr]

ok, you prefer static?

I still can't find in the documentation where it says that the default address is 192.168.1.254/24?

It happens that the default network at mine is 192.168.0.1/24.

But could just as easily have been class A or B or any other Class C network?
I'm not saying that IP SHOULDN'T be static, over all I could not care less.

What I am saying is making it static would mean I either need to change the address scheme of my network (as a whole) to just plug it in and make it work, or I need to assign a static IP on a random network to the wired network car on my laptop, (thank god I don't just have a small netbook without wired network conncetion!)

And that's if you can find what the default address is...

Dynamic assignment means, plug into spare home on home router/hub.
If you have disabled DHCP, then simply enabling it.

I understand some people disable DHCP either for reasons of security, or because they plain don't like it.
those people would have the understanding to either setup a local one on a machine or turn it on briefly to get the box working.

The question "how can A10/A20 boards beat the Pi"... that's one really really small thing, make it really really simple to use.

Those that want to complicate things can complicate it for themselves.


As it is I had a board that I thought was broken, and paid 8x the cost of getting a serial adapter from China as I knew that Olimex would deliver next day...

This took, Friday night/Saturday morning, Sunday evening, made me need to buy new hardware, and finally I figure out what the issue is!


I'll leave this now, I wanted the board to be a small headless file server anyway, so that the HDMI doesn't seem to work on my board is kind of neither here nor there...

[JohnS]

The short answer is that nothing from Olimex can beat RPi unless they can get serious support from Allwinner (no chance - AW don't even obey GPL) and insider help at BBC.

John

[dod38fr]

Back to boot with SD card problem...

I also had some trouble to boot my A20 lime/4GB board with a SD card.

Turns out the the board is not compatible with the Debian SD card provided by Olimex. When booting, the serial console reports that no RAM is found and ask user to reboot the board (even with a 2A power supply).

I've copied Olimex Debian image to a 8GB SD card and the board is working fine now. 

If you have problem booting from a SD card, you may want to try other brands of SD card.

Hope this helps

[kaloyan]

I have the same issue, as you.
Since my cards are slower(4GB, class 2), I have left the device for some minutes,
but again nothing happened.

The network lights are from packets comming into the device, nothing goes out.
I have attached it to my laptop and capture traffic  with tcpdump.

I have the A20-Olinuxino-Lime-4Gb, use 5V/2.5A to the power connector.

Today I bought brand new TDK class10 8GB microSD HC card, copied same files I used with my old cards,
and board just worked.

[dannym]

Hi danielr,

however, what does seem clear is that the HDMI just doesn't work...
I've tried every setting in the
./change_display_a20_lime.sh script, nothing is displayed on my TV.

I had the same problem but with A20 Olinuxino MICRO.

Try putting into /boot/uEnv.txt (or whereever your existing uEnv.txt or kernel is):
extraargs=disp.screen0_output_type=3 disp.screen0_output_mode=EDID:1920x1080p60 hdmi.audio=EDID:0 root=/dev/sda1

.. or whatever your root is, of course.

This and the ./change_display_a20.sh make HDMI work on a DVI monitor, if that's what you are trying to do. (the monitor engineers of my monitor apparently got confused with changing requirements - my monitor has loudspeakers but not HDMI audio)