Olimage build script is not working

[leo.costa]

Hello,
i can't compile a distribution for the A20-SOM204 on a Ubuntu 20.04 desktop. I need some additional drivers in the kernel so i have to recompile the distribution. Olimex customized Armbian does not work anymore because some links are not up-to-date with those of the official Armbian.
I cloned the Olimage directory, but there is not a manual or a readme with build instructions. I launched the build.sh script but after some minutes i get this error:
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Exception: Command failed: qemu-debootstrap --arch=armhf --components=main,universe,multiverse bionic /olimage/output/a20-olinuxino/filesystem/bionic-minimal http://ports.ubuntu.com/
E: Command failed: qemu-debootstrap --arch=armhf --components=main,universe,multiverse bionic /olimage/output/a20-olinuxino/filesystem/bionic-minimal http://ports.ubuntu.com/
------------------------
At the moment Olimex boards are not usable in a customized hardware, this is a big problem with already developed project. Any suggestions?

Leonardo

[LubOlimex]

We are not maintaining the Armbian images anymore. Only the Olimage images.

There are no build instructions but there are build scripts:

https://github.com/OLIMEX/olimage

To see what command to run to compile the image check this:

https://github.com/OLIMEX/olimage/blob/master/build.sh

[olimex]

"At the moment Olimex boards are not usable in a customized hardware, this is a big problem with already developed project. Any suggestions?"

Please explain what do you mean as I can't understand? Which other boards are usable in customized project? There are no boards in the market which to be 100% exchangable.

Meanwhile I would say that building your own images is very risky. I frankly try to understand why every one think that once the script is available they should definitely try to build their own image. Why? All processor features are covered in the official images, what else you need which can't be installed with apt install, but you must include in your own image?
 
Building custom image is not simple thing and you have to have extensive knowledge both for hardware and linux as otherwise there is 99.999% to include in your image some incompatibilities or bugs and to have problems later when you run your project in field.

We extensively test our images to remove as many bugs as possible and still there are bugs we catch in some corner cases. For instance we have images with 5.8 since month but released last week as we were testing.

In your questtion above you didn't install all tools you need to build the image. If you can't figure something so simple my advice is to not experiment specially if you want to use this image in reliable project.

[leo.costa]

Hello,
i'm building images for olinuxino boards since 4 years, at that time for the Olinuxino-Micro, the project now switched to a new hardware based on the SOM204, so last year i re-built the Armbian and it was working without any problem. Mainly I need to re-build the kernel because we are using a 4G radio module with USB interface and the Silicon Labs W111 wifi chip. Default kernel from armbian, but also the last one from olimex (olimage 5.18.x) does not include drivers for those hardware. Armbian is documented, olimage has no documentation at all.

Leo

[leo.costa]

Hello,
i resolved the problem using the pre-built default olimage image and re-building only the kernel using the linux-olimex package of the git repository.

Leo